A trick I saw in an older trapping video for fox was to dig deeper pocket under your trap bed and anchor under there. I have not used thisyet. Any one on hereable to picture what Im speaking about? It seems like a great way to preserve your set as it adds a steeper angle to the chain or cable.

Are you talking about a buried bait set?
If so its a good one.

Once an animal starts pulling on the chain and turning circles, I'm not sure how the angle at which the stake is fastened can change much for set preservation. The animal is going to pull up/sideways no matter what.

Unless it's trying to say stake the set away from whatever your using as an attractant or a trail . I try to do that with snares. I set the snare and then run out the free end as far away from the bottleneck in the trail as possible. Could maybe do the same with chain on a foot hold or just short chain them.

I find the more a fox tears up a set,the better it gets.

Zagger's pipe dream is set up that way.

It seems like a great deal of additional work for a fox, as it is a fox after all. What was evolved in the 80's was the short chain to not deal with longer chains both in transportation and to keep the animal from flagging, injury and pumping stakes out. Fox are not stake pumpers, but giving that kind of leverage to a fox would require an anchor cable. It would seem to be of limited benefit as the pros used to slap in sets in minutes with least possible effort.

Who said i was only going to use this for fox? This is extra work but seems an interesting set.

If you want to preserve a set, you need to use a drag or slidewire or 5 feet or more of chain.

Thanks for a feed back. I think this will prove interesting