If anyone has watched rats walk on floats much one thing comes into light pretty quickly. Rats skirt the edges...like most any prey species. The gap between the pan of those traps and the edge is huge. Kind of like making a 12" mink pocket and tossing a small trap dead center.
Another thing that comes into light when watching rats on floats is how many times they walk up and down the plank of most of these floats without getting caught. I watched one rat do 5 laps back and forth, jumped in and swam off when two traps were on the plank.
Like mink trapping, dont look at the pocket (or float in this case) look at the pan and the wall relationship. They have to step on the pan. And a dinky #1 guard trap is a huge handicap.
I have also watched rats step all over traps and trap pans without firing them...some mine and freshly tuned. Makes you scratch your head and go back to the drawing board.
The above floats miss lots of rats. Photo #1 more so than the later. Not a problem if you have rats in bulk, but an issue when you don't.
x10 what Calvin said....I like to build as narrow a possible with trap 90 degrees to whats shown for simple reason its easyer to skinny up the floats w/o having levers in the way.....another thing that will catch more rats on floats is using drywall screw up from bottom as it holds your carrot better than a finish nail head.......another advanced feature is to use small 1x2 spacers or custom cut spacer blocks that will allow stacking floats with set or locked open traps via a hog ring, so they can be stacked w/o firing traps settng on your board.....setting 2 traps per float is a huge time killer compared just slapping down pre set traps or even locked open hog rings.....i saw a fancy trap locking method once where a guy had a counterbored hole and offset to that hole bout 50% of dia off side of that hole, anothher hole c'bored but with washer in it held down a screw.....it was set up so crossframe pointy end of trap slide under washer and locked trap in place, even when your board was carried sideways, was real slick if guy could duplicate it......another speed float trick is using metal fence posts w/ triangle for stakes as allows you to carry 2 floats/1 stake each hand w/ float held up by triangle to the slew.....to be really effective id cut down the triangles so not as much tangle mess to store on board your outfit
