What’s a spud

I’ve heard the word spud over the years from different guys that Ice fish. I guess they use it to check the thick ness. Would someone describe what one looks like? John

Most are a steel bar about 4.5-5 feet long with a wedge shaped head at one end for chiseling open holes in the ice. If I find a picture of one, I’ll post it for you to see.

Here ya go:

lol I was going to post that pic, but it didn’t seem to do the description justice.

Here’s an image I drew of what my Dad’s spud looks like. The green area is a baseball bat and the rest is steel.

Actually, it’s a device that warns you when you’re about to crash through the ice into the freezing cold water. Kinda like one of those sticks they use to find water. That or an Idaho russet.

It’s really a device for ‘first icers’ so that they can check that the ice is safe in front of them. It’s a heavy steel bar with a sharp wedge as described above, and you thunk the point into the ice in front of you as you walk along using it like a walking staff.

A good homemade one is a busted blade off of a chisel plow welded onto a piece of pipe around 6′ long. The T handle at the top keeps it from slipping from your hand and going to the bottom if it punches through. A couple years ago we were walking along and the lead guy was spudding the way; he punched it through and with no handle, down it went.

What followed was truly hilarious – he stood there on about one inch of ice and bitched for what seemed like ten minutes about losing the spud bar, all the while the rest of us were sloooooowly edging back away from him. When he realized what was happening, he made tracks back toward us as well.

Boy, was I off base, all this time I thought it had some thing to do with this dog named spuds Mackenzie. Some how you send him off ahead to check the thickness of the ice. Sure glad ya all cleared that up for me gills