[CAUT] Accujust and grunting fish bait

[Jeff Tanner]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Richard Brekne" <ricb at pianostemmer.no>

...plate ring resonant frequency going.  That can be very
objectionable indeed.  Tho I wouldn't imagine it had much to do with the
vertical hitch pin per sé.

Ric, others,
I'd like to answer your post again, now that I've had some time to think on 
it.  I believe the plate ring is due entirely to the vertical hitch pin.

I'm going to reveal a bit of the country (let's call it pioneer) experience 
from my childhood.  Before we became so sophisticated that we began to 
purchase fish bait from a bait shop there existed a technique of gathering 
worms for fishing that I learned as a boy on our family farm. The process is 
this:  Take a "stob" (country for "wooden stake, preferably from a tobacco 
stick, roughly 1 1/2" to 1 3/4" square by 18" to 24" long") and drive it in 
the ground, leaving oh, 10" to 12" sticking out.  Rubbing a "grubbin' hoe" 
(we called it, may be mattocks?, a heavy hoe, approximately 6" wide by 8" or 
so long - an ax may also work) across the top of the "stob", having 
developed a bit of skill to the art, will create a "grunt" sound, somewhat 
like the sound of a bullfrog bellowing.  After 5 minutes or so (depending on 
recent weather patterns) of grunting the stob, earthworms will begin to 
demonstrate their inability to cope with the wretched vibration and crawl to 
the surface.  A well skilled grunter can produce vibrations that will enable 
harvesting of earthworms as far away as 30 to 50 feet from the stob.  You 
can fish all day with what you can pick up. How many you catch is the 
subject for another forum.

The longer the length of stob sticking out of the ground, the lower the 
grunt will be.  Driven deeper, the grunt will be higher in pitch.  Drive it 
too deep, and you can't make a sound.  The length of wood will be too short 
to vibrate (at least react to this particular stimulus).

Here, we have what is essentially a vertical hitch pin, transmitting 
vibrations.  The length of springpin or rollpin protruding from the plate 
conducts, if not amplifies, the vibration from the hammer strike and string 
vibration to the plate, just like the stob does.  It can't not.

Unanonomously submitted,
Jeff Tanner