I like making thing including fish traps.
When I was a kid Mama always said I could take anything apart. She didn’t mention putting it back together again. As I got older I did learn to re-assemble my projects, and learned a lot about building things from scratch, too.
Living on a farm with 11,000 laying hens there were always pieces of equipment to fix, chicken houses to repair and other jobs around the farm that required building skills. Daddy was really good at coming up with a design for anything we needed and building it without plans other than those in his head.
While in college I worked each summer at National Homes in Thomson, assembling pre-fab houses at that company. I learned a lot about carpentry, electrical work and plumbing. It is a good feeling being able to fix most things that go wrong or break. But sometimes I know just enough to get myself into trouble.
One summer I “borrowed” enough scrap lumber at work to build a bow box. It had a rack for my bow and all my arrows, and a shelf for accessories. It was six feet tall, a foot deep, made out of half-inch ply wood and 2x12s, and almost too heavy to move. But I kept it in my dorm room all through college and it still sits in my garage, 45 years later. It was built to last.
If you have a boat you are going to have problems. In June I broke a steering cable on my trolling motor. I tried to find someone to replace it for me but gave up and got new cables. I was careful taking the old ones out to make sure I knew how they went in the foot control and motor head, and even took pictures.
With just a couple of mistakes I had to go back and correct I got it working in time for my next tournament. I have installed trolling motors, depth finders, transducers, bilge and live well pumps and switches, and almost all worked like they were supposed to work when I finished.
Like everything I built growing up, and even now, my rabbit boxes featured function over form. All us boys built and set rabbit boxes to catch rabbits to eat and possums to sell. My friend AT could make a very pretty box that worked great. Mine didn’t look so pretty but they worked.
I built cages for many of the animals I caught and for my hamsters. My hamster cages were about two feet square, with four different cages and doors for each on each one. When raising them to sell you need a lot of cages.
After moving to Griffin in 1972 I caught a young raccoon one night when walking back to the car after deer hunting. I built him a big cage, about six feet long with hardware cloth bottom, sides and top. It was raised about a foot of the floor on legs. That cage sat in my living room and the raccoon was beginning to get tame when Linda decided to vacuum under it – with him inside.
He was never the same after that and I had to let him go and get rid of the cage. Maybe she did it on purpose?
I have built some deer stands but preferred hunting out of my climbing stand. I had one of the first ones in the state. A friend saw one in a magazine, designed and built some and sold me one for $3.00. That was in 1965, when they first came out.
My best deer stand ever was very simple, two 2X4s between two sweet gum trees about three feet apart, with an 18 inch board nailed on top. I took an old coke case with a pad I attached to the top to sit on with me. Over the years I killed about 30 deer from that stand.
It was not real comfortable. Most of the guys in the club had very nice stands that were comfortable to hunt from. But mine had one advantage. It was so small nobody else in the club ever asked if they could hunt from it!
One of my most functional projects was a fish trap. For many years we put out trotlines, jugs and bank hooks at Clarks Hill and the best bait was a small three inch bream. It was fun catching them for bait on hook and line, but when we had out a couple hundred hooks we could not catch enough bait.
I bought a roll of hardware cloth and made a two foot square cage fish trap for small bream. I could put some dog food in it, drop it under our dock and catch enough little bream for all our hooks. The hardware cloth holes were small enough to catch very small bream.
All my projects were fun, and most worked as I intended. Now, what should I build next?