Something on my bucket list for this year. My question is do you guys with experience think a #5 with pit pan will have to much pan tension for this type of set. Hopefully enough to eliminate small beave and still catch the decent ones.
My two traps to choose from are #4 coil and #5 longs both set up with pit pans. Probably 5 lbs of tension.

I would keep the pan tension light on an under ice set.What type of set do you plan on making?baited,or den entrance

Baited pole sets. Might have to find the original pans for the #4s

Could you describe how you set up a baited pole set?

Wire some Aspen sticks to a pole and mount the trap below them. Figured I'd make a bracket to put the trap on.

Somewhere near the house or the dam, especially in a deeper snow winter, is a thin spot in the ice. I like to find such a spot, near the house, and make a hole there with a chisel, in shoulder gauntlet deep water and bed a beaver trap there with 4' of chain, staked with a dry pole on the shore side. All around the backside of the trap you push in 1" aspen sticks penning off the backside of the trap, and right close to it, around it, 5 or 6 of them leaving the deep water side open. These sticks can protrude above the water line to freeze in. The beaver will try to chew them off at mud level or slightly above , putting a foot down for leverage.

I cover the whole mess with balsam boughs, and 3' of snow to keep it from freezing if possible. It works great.

I bought some small shelf brackets and screwed them on to some 3/4" by 2" by 8" pieces of pine board. It's a lot easier and much warmer to screw this on a pole than mess with wiring up a trap shelf in the field. It's hard enough as it is.

I have caught a few on platforms on dead poles with popple bait wired above the trap. I thought I would try this setup with the #4 or #14 with Pit pans. The spring is stuck in one of the cerfs I have cut a varying levels and the swivel acts as a lock on a cable to the bottom of the dead pole. The popple bait is screwed above the trap. This is not what I consider to be highly effective but it is fun to experiment with and it does catch the occasional beaver.

That's an interesting rig right there.

MnMan. I’m missing something here. How can the spring effectively work if it’s placed in the pole?
Thanks

I used the same setup for muskrat one year. Switch bait to carrot or potato or parsnips and works about the same. The amount of.work that went into it was not cost effective but fun experiment. I used #1 jumps and spring works fine but trap does.drop as it fires. Didn't have many sprung empty traps though. I now stick to flowing water for winter rats. Much more effective for me.