Traps

[Bountyhunter]

Traps seldom wear out. Once in a while a part will break and it can be replaced. However, new traps have a mill glaze and a very smelly greasy oil on them that will make animals trap shy very quickly. I always took my new traps and boiled them in a large kettle that had walnut hulls, cedar limbs and logwood dye in it. That cut the grease and oil and took away the strange scent. After boiling, the top was skimmed off the kettle to get rid of the scum and grease before removing the traps. I let them hang and rust for a couple of months and then reboiled them in clean water that had some beeswax and parafin melted on the top of it. The boilin hot traps were pulled up through the wax and allowed to drip dry. The wax is to lubricate the trap, make it faster, not for anti rusting, even though it does inhibit rust.

My traps all look used, as the double long spring traps are buried in the soil for proper trap setting. For Beaver, they are under water. Either way, they are going to rust some. However, they dont rust through, they get an initial coating and then essentially stop.

The thing is, the traps of the original trapper would have had to have gotten some rust. The trapper would have taken as good of care of them as he could, but would certainly not have oiled or greased them, as that would have alerted the beaver to their presence. What I'm getting at is, once the trapper put his traps away in 1845, there is no promise of how they were taken care of after that. How many hands did they pass through? Who didnt care?

You might take real good care of your high dollar rifle now, but you have no guarantee of how it will be treated 50 years from now by your grand kids or great grand kids, if one of them gets ahold of it, and doesnt care.

So, no, the traps were not bright and shiny. They were rusty, like a browned gun barrel. They mighta had some shine on the edges of the jaws where the springs rubbed, but that would be all. If you set a shiny trap and the wind blows the cover off of it, it can make a shine that is seen for hundreds of yards. A rusty trap just sets there. In the proper trap set, the only part of the trap covered is the pan~~with a pan cover~~the jaws are "hidden" or covered with very dry fine dirt. If it rains, the dirt becomes mud. When trapping in muddy ground, I carry in fresh dry dirt to bed my traps. Hope that this provides a little bit of a picture for you as to how these traps would actually look.

Bill

 

[tg]

Good post Bounythunter, I see you have bent some steel. Many do no see the connection with dying a trap and browning a barrel it does help prevent further deteriorization, even though scent is not sn issue in water sets. I again strongly recommend Geratells book for anyone interested in trap history from the Plymouth colony on....

 

[mmahlock]

I have just checked several inventories including the inventory of equipment turned over to the NWC by Hunt in 1813 and trade inventories from 1837 and others. They included not just traps but trap springs and some trap chains. There must have been some level of standardization.

I started asking my question because of the level of rust pit and general material deterioration of the trap in the opening photo. I felt is was a bit much for a trap that was at most 15 years old.

 

[tg]

As I stated earlier, at times spare springs of a given size could be ordered, often when a buyer ordered traps they would order extra springs as well, these would be made to fit the traps as made, springs were the weakest point as they could break when subjected to freezing weather, and were the hardest item to maintain quality control when ordering traps from various sources, MOST repairs were done when a smith was found and one might often be attatched to a company trapping party.. the pic in the front of this thread looks like an original to me probably first half 19th century with considerable pitting, though from what I can see I would not consider it unusable.