hey I'm Bobby food for me quick to endure what I'm about to do is make a figure for trap what I want to do is I want to show people these notches and actually how they're made it's really it's it's really key for you to bring a small saw in the woods with you I have a Swiss Army knife that I gotten from Ron hood years ago I keep it with me all the time it's probably one of the best saws as far as a small saw for for making small cuts such as a four figure force that you can that you can buy they make a one that's called the trekker and there's a couple of others to the farmer but you want to get the the largest small saw that you can so I'm about to I had some of these put together for a class that we were doing so I figured I'd snatch one out of there and actually put the figure four together what we have is we have the trigger stick I'll set that off to the side won't need that for a while and then we have two other sticks are basically the same length maybe one's a little bit bigger you got to remember the thickest one should be the one that you're going to have as your angle piece only because you're going to be making more cuts in it so what I'm going to do is I'm going to use this one as my angle piece now remember you want to go about two inches from the end with your notch at your angle piece but we'll get into that when we get there and then you can see of the figure four well I want to explain to you a couple of things before we get started there's there's two ways to do this you can slow this thing down or you can speed it up now a lot of times I find if I'm after a beaver and I got it on a trail of course I'll be using something bigger than this I like to slow it down only because they're waddler and it takes them a while to get into the trap so it you can like I said speed it up slow it down okay so I'm going to set that aside and we're going to start with our base piece this is our up-and-down piece and what you want to do is is you want to find a piece that doesn't isn't really knotted up at the top because it'll make it hard for you to make the cut the only thing we're going to do is we're going to cut this so it looks like a regular screwdriver okay so we're almost down to where we need it I'm going to show you this doesn't have to be absolutely perfect to work I'm going to be of course the wood that I'm using is a little crooked which is fine and what I want to do is I just want to show you that like Ron hood used to say close enough is good enough but a little tip that I do that I don't see a lot of people do is if you'll look you'll see I've actually made one side longer than the other as far as the cut length and I do that intentionally I do that because when I'm trying to put this whole thing together like this I know that this on this long side I'll have more clearance when it moves and I know that this side is the side that I'm going to use every time when I'm putting this thing together in other words okay when I set it up to see if it's going to work I won't turn it backwards because these two are the same length I'll have it in the same direction every time just a key just something that I do because I've been doing these a while like I said I'm just gonna I'm gonna rough it out and I'm not gonna try to make it real pretty so there's there's the first part as you can see it's not perfect but what you want is you don't want you want this perfectly flat so what I need to do is take that one take this one side down a little bit okay now I'm gonna leave it rough say it's rough leave it rough so you can see it doesn't have to be perfect okay so now we're gonna work on once we got this we're gonna work on this angle piece like I said you want two inches okay this is a little long so what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to take my soil and I'm going to cut it down a little bit okay I'll set that there in the in the when I'm actually doing this in the woods for real I don't ever set my stuff down but today it's not a big deal okay so now you can see that'll work again we're gonna make our notch so I'm gonna make it right in here now the key is not to go through the heartwood the heartwood is the hardest part and actually will hold the whole thing together alright what I'm doing is the reason why I cut this before I started making the the actual cut back is because if I don't cut that down and I try to make this notch what's going to happen is I'm gonna actually flake the the wood right off on the end and I don't want to do that it'll weaken this part so what I what I do is I cut this first try to get it as straight as you can you can always fix it after it's called tweaking and then I like to make my knots a little long but as you can see I just just started going into the heartwood okay I'm not through the heartwood if I go all the way through the heart all the way through the heartwood or even halfway through the art wood it's gonna make this week now again like I said you've got this part here it's long I always want to do it the same direction now you see if I go through the heartwood when you put weight on here because that's what will hold that's what holds the whole thing together when you put weight on here this will bend and snap don't go through the heartwood okay so now what I'm gonna do is I've made this knot that fits into this knotch so to get this straight for my trigger to actually get into this okay this has to be perpendicular or straight on this edge okay so what I do is I hold it like this okay and I put my think my thumb on this and then what I do is I make two or three slices and then I put the whole thing back together to make sure that this is going to set now you see it's at an angle it's almost straight but it needs to come off this side a little bit more okay so that's what I'm gonna do it's gotta come off that side yes a little bit more and then I put it all back together using this long side again and you can see it looks good so now what I'll do is I'll go to the back side or the underneath and do the same thing now I can actually use this wood to make sure that my cut underneath stays straight see see how it's right here it's thinner and fatter on this side so I want to take it off that side okay until I get it so it looks pretty like I said it doesn't have to be perfect all it has to do is be functional it needs to work one of the reasons why I like showing this trap is because you can actually make a trap to sustain yourself with no paracord and I think it's pretty important to have you know to be versatile by everything that you do so again this is the long side sets in there it looks straight there's a little edge right there but you know what we're not gonna play with that now we need to figure out where our triggers gonna go okay so now the old timers have told me that now of course this isn't 3/8 of an inch monied x' to be a little bit bigger than this but but this is just a pattern that I'm going to be sending to somebody for every inch that you go in on a 3/8 to 1/2 inch piece of wood for the trigger it'll hold 50 pounds now I don't know if that's true or not but that's what I've been told so so what I'm going to do is I'm going to leave a little extra that's where I want this cut to be right here so now I'll do the same thing I'll make that same knot making sure that I don't go through the heartwood okay we'll set it back up long end again okay see now that will fit in there fits in there good now when I put pressure down on the top of this it wants to go in this direction okay it wants to go in this direction so what we'll do is we're going to hold that there I'm gonna put my thumb here and that's where I want to make my next cup and it's almost 90 degrees from that end right so what I'm doing is this I'm not I'm gonna make sure I don't go through the heartwood again okay I want this one as close as I can get it there it is now here is a key part of this we're going to call this part the feathering okay the feathering if I was to put the feathering on this side it won't work it'll just slide by when it when it when it when it tries to grab on to that base piece so a little tip that I tell everybody is have the back of the feathering face each other so I've got the back of the feathering this feathering is facing this feathering okay this feathering is facing this feathering then I know that it's right so now what I'm going to do is set it back up again of course there's the long end there's that okay now I know that that's gonna want to grab on and I'll put this at an angle so that you can see see I know that that's gonna want to grab on so what I need to do is I need to flatten this piece here a little bit and then flatten this over here a little bit I like going at an angle and leaving this little piece that will give me something to cut or actually to guide my cup so then we'll start again okay again making sure that this long piece is right putting this up against here and look now that wants to grab on okay just by making those two little pieces and leaving this Ridge okay I know that I can adjust either one of these to make this go in or out you know right now it looks like it's going to work fine a little tip that I do is now I have actually had animals in here they'll come through of course you want to this is your trigger of course and you want to funnel them in so that they land on your trigger but I've actually had animals push this all the way to the ground and it's followed this notch so what I do is I mark this right here okay you see that Mark and I round this off so I round this off all the way down okay and I'll show you why in a second again the long side so I know what's going together right this is all hooked up just like that okay now watch it's gonna slide down see it slide then it hits that round spot and it releases it in the woods you of course want to make this bigger depending on what you were what you were trapping I've actually seen people make them out of matchsticks and use them for trapping mice which is cool well that's it that's how you make a figure four there's not much to it it's pretty simple and this is what I put together for the classes and this is how I teach people how to do it okay so there's that video and I hope you got something out of it i'm bobby flew from equipped wind or get on the web website check us out if you want one of these you can order it and remember if you're not always prepared you're never prepared this just gives you one way of making a trap without paracord thank you