How to Make a Paiute Deadfall

How to Make a Paiute Deadfall Paiute deadfalls are wonderful piece of Bushcraft technology. It’s fast, it’s efficient and easily made without cutting tools. Now this is important because if you find yourself needing the skill with trapping being illegal for the most part and maybe because you’re in an emergency and you may not have a cutting tool in it. I like this much better than a figure four deadfall for various reasons which I’ll discuss throughout this video. Let’s begin by gathering the materials we need. The materials for Paiute deadfall are fairly easy to find besides the deadfall itself you need two sticks, fairly thick like this and straight. I just broke a stick actually in half to make this two. A small twig for toggle and these are your bait stick. You only need one to gather two or three different links because inevitably you break one or you’re trying to adjust the cracked size. The next thing you need is some cordage and if you don’t have any with you I’ll show you how to make some. Making your own cordage is a fun and fairly simple task. Just find some suitable material. This is nettle that I gathered earlier and I dried it and I re-soak and all you have to do to make cordages you want to spin your material in the same direction until it kinks like so. This is the middle of my strand but now I'm just going to roll both sides of my nettles just to sort of train them a little bit into the right shape. And now you roll like this holding the “V” and when it gets nice and tight you let go and you’ll see it starts to form a cord of by itself and then grab where it stops and do it again. You keep doing this until you have enough. Now, I attach your cordage to one of the sticks. I'm going to use just a simple round turn in two half hitches. What I'm doing now is making an indentation in the top of my upright and I'm just using the rock. If you had a knife or a spoon knife of course this would be a lot faster and easier but this will work fine. Now, I just want to make a little spot for that other sticks to rest right there and once it is done you're ready to set it up. Right now I'm just trying to put all this together. Once you make this for a while you get an idea of how long your cord has to be which lets you just slip in the toggle like so to the end loop in your nettle cord because that way you don’t have a big obtrusive not there on the end. Now you want to find a nice, balance point to your deadfall. That is a common problem with deadfalls is that a lot of times, they’ll fall to one side or to the other so be sure that when you do this that you have a good sort of center mask and that is nice and sturdy. Also with this type of old school Pauite trap this upright isn’t straight up and down. It’s angled like so and you put other sticks like this, replaced it with your deadfall like so and that should form about a 90 degree angle like that. The toggle trigger on the cord then goes around the upright like so and now the bait stick fits between this toggle and the back of your deadfall and this is the tricky part of course is setting this up. But if you notice what I was saying earlier about why I like this type of trap better than the figure four is that if you notice my hands are well behind where the deadfall would land. It’s much safer than the figure four where to get hairpin trigger you’re really kind of underneath it a lot more than this and of course you may have to adjust this stick as needed and I’ll get this set up and then we’ll show you how it works. It’s of course a view now that it is set up of how the toggle meets the bait stick and by zooming out you can see how the bait stick hits up against the deadfall and one more view from the top. The only thing left to do now is to spring it and another one of my favorite things about this trap in addition to being easy to set up without cutting tools and the fact that you can set up that trigger mechanism without putting your hand in harm’s way is that the trigger is very, very sensitive especially coming from the downward angle where figure four is a little bit harder to get that to work right so I'm just going to take this lightweight stick here dead twig and show you how it works. But that about covers it. Please use this information wisely and only when you're in dire need. If you used a cardboard box instead of a heavy object this trap can be little means of catching mice and letting them go later. You’ll feel better and so the ox. So thanks for watching. Please visit us at BushcraftNorthwest.com for more videos, articles, gear and information.