I’ve heard longs springs don’t freeze in as easy as coil springs. The reasons make sense to me but just wondering if anyone has any experience to prove it?

Just bought some Bridger #4 offset long springs. I base plated them and added PIT pans. I’m not overly impressed with them. Some are hard to set. I was planning on getting more and using them for when things start to freeze up but now I’m not sure. We get a lot of freeze-thaw so setting long springs isn’t an issue but looking for something that will be better when the ground does freeze.

If you are dealing with any number of domestic animals I would stay with coil spring traps.

Use waxed dirt to cut down on that freezing problem it improves your odds greatly under most conditions. Like said if your dealing with hard ground coils take less chopping to bed them and disturbs less ground.

I use mostly long springs Im old school I guess. LS are harder to bed in frozen ground but like them in water easy to open and reset when wading. As far as freezing I have pulled up just this year LS traps that would spring but were frozen solid to the ground at the bottom spring that had to be chipped out. I have had two fox over the years in a LS trap caught that were stationary in other words the trap and chain were frozen down solid and the fox could not move.

More ground contact, means more area to freeze down.

the top spring in most cases will still rise.

X2. Which does all the work

But unlike a coilspring, they will still go off when frozen to the ground as long as the jaws aren't frozen down. Coilsprings have the springs under the trap and the levers touching the ground, longsprings it doesn't matter if the springs or the baseplate is froze down, the top half of the spring will still come up just the same as an unfrozen trap (as long as you don't have ice over it, freezing it down) and as long as the jaws aren't froze down it will still go off and catch something just fine. Coilsprings do tend to be faster and if not froze down they tend to "jump" a little bit and get a little higher catch, and are easier to dig a trap bed for in frozen ground. But not that much, because you need to dig it deeper and bigger than the trap to make sure and put plenty of waxed dirt under it so they don't freeze down.

This is what I was thinking would be the case. Anyone have an opinion on the Sleepy Creeks vs the Bridgers? At first I thought I would like the bridgers more because I can get them with offset jaws but I’m just not happy with the few I got to try. Maybe I can find some used Sleepy Creek #3s.

I did a test a few years back trying to trap in winter around here coils, long spring , had 40 traps out after 2 weeks only 4 traps would fire when I step on them , I try 10 with wax dirt 10 with wax paper under trap, 10 with reg, dirt dried. 10 with salt mix in dirt, all 4 that fired were in the shad and protected from overhead two were coils tow were long springs

DLS are pretty much all I use for cat traps in our nasty freezing slushbombcrud weather. I run a few coils in places where theft could occur. All are exposed sets that I make on a couple handfuls of waxed dirt. The coils will eventually freeze down, the DLS always stay working. I couldn't imagine trying to run bedded DLS (e.g. K9 sets) in the same conditions though.

Some pics of sets that have all taken cats.