I was wondering if anyone out there has this detail on their traps:
It’s clearly not on the hero trap from the GB1, but it’s there in the GB2 court room scene.
Most of the plans I’ve looked at and the replicas I’ve seen leave if off; and I’m not 100% clear on what it is. Is it just holding the bottom plate of the “cage” and the “wheel plate” together, or is there to keep the cartridge from sliding out? And it so, is it meant to fold out of the way somehow when the trap is emptied?
While I can’t say for sure, I think you nailed it as having been added as a way to keep the cartridge from accidentally being popped out. As mentioned in that video, this is one of the R/C modified traps and the electronics go from the cartridge to the trap body (for the power switch and the Linrose light).
As for how it folds out of the way to empty the trap, I would say the answer to that is “it doesn’t,” because this part is a practical modification used for it being a filming prop (to prevent the cartridge from ever coming out and damaging the wiring), not something that would have had a purpose in-universe.
I thought about going (I don’t live that far from the Petersen and have been there for a Corvette event before) but they require registering for the auction itself in order to participate. I have no interest in bidding but I threw in a registration anyway. Unfortunately this process is not automatic so I have no clue if I will be “approved”. Without this approval, you can’t be there on the day of, nor can you actually attend the curated exhibition (despite the cost of both being, technically, free).
EDIT: Anyway, here are some better screenshots. From these you can see that this is likely the frame for the electronics to sit on, and the cartridge is likewise attached to this frame. In fact in the side shot you can see that this frame was essentially an afterthought as far as the prop went because its presence is causing the front plate of the trap to bend outwards at the bottom.
Keep in mind that this exact prop has been auctioned before (maybe 4-5 years ago?), so there’s plenty of good reference photos out there already which have better lighting than the video.
The cartridge on this trap does seem to be a separate module but instead of having a latch in the handle to hold it in place (like the ECU trap), it has that extra plate bolted on. Although I don’t think that plate was there in GB1, it might have been added for GB2 (it doesn’t seem to be there during the Sedgewick ballroom scene). It’s there during the GB2 courtroom scene though:
Edit 2: OK, I’m getting two separate traps slightly mixed up here. The courtroom trap and the jogger trap are two different ones, which might explain why the courtroom trap has two bolts in the front plate but the jogger trap only has one bolt.
The Reference Library makes this clear, that there were (at least) two RC traps:
Was just about to say that this was not the same trap. But both being RC hero traps, the plate likely serves the same purpose–which is the purpose I posited above.
Unless someone can find a non-RC trap that has the plate, of course.
So I’ve always assumed it was in the Dan Lanigan collection (along with the Spengler hero pack and the last remaining PKE), but then I saw this video earlier today:
David Mandel (showrunner of Veep, among a long list of credits including executive producing Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm) says here that he has an ejecting cartridge trap in his collection, and he believes it’s the ECU trap. He also describes the electronics briefly, so it sounds like he’s looked inside at least once.
So either Dan Lanigan’s trap is a different one and I’ve been mistaken all this time, or he let it go from his collection at some point and it’s now in David’s hands, or David is mistaken about which trap he has. I believe this photo was from 2020:
