Troubleshooting & making a minnow trap

Homemade minnow trap from 1/4" mesh. Jump to 14 minutes if you don't care about the plot or the problems.
Construction note: if you don't already have a scrap piece of chicken wire to play with, make a practice cone out of paper first.
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As an aside, this video discusses the process of figuring out how to get your inventions to work, hopefully in a slightly structured and logical process. Sometimes it's important to know what went wrong where and why, so that you can work on improving the next version. Whenever I make anything, I expect some level of failure, and so I prepare for it by thinking about how to improve the second one!
Here's a strange pattern I've noticed after making weird things for the last several decades: 1) The first one is usually buggy, because you don't really know what you're doing. 2) The second one usually works best, because you are comfortable, confident, and competent. Here it's all fresh in your mind; at this point you are both inspired and focused. 3) The third one is usually a slightly lesser quality than the second- but other people (who haven't made one) won't be able to notice. By the time you're working on the third one, it's becoming tedious, and so you start to lose your concentration. This tiny decline in quality is the mark of the beginning of arrogance; it is the overestimation of one's own abilities, where we have stopped improving our skill in order that we might start to congratulate ourselves. Remember, confidence is focused on the task, where cockiness always has a secondary objective. To find out which you are, ask yourself what your true goals are, and answer in the most intellectually honest way possible. Many of our acts of creation are simply self-indulgences paid to the ego in some strange effort to impress others. Ironic that vanity could be the fuel of innovation, is it not? Whatever gets us there, I guess. Although it is a bit of a tragedy to worship an uncaring muse. We worry about our own dingy shoes at a funeral, even as the corpse is beside us- yet no one else pays notice. And why not? Because they are all preoccupied with their own shoes.