Remove Trap's definitely a challenging skill to raise. I have one faction thief with GM Remove Trap and have another thief character I'm training who is at about 70 Remove Trap. Here are a few tips for you:
<ul> [*]Wear high physical armor and have a reliable way to heal. (I'm using magery again on this character.)
[*]Try to avoid wearing gloves when you remove traps. Your success is supposed to be better without them on, plus working on the skill really dings the durability of your gloves.
[*]As you're working the skill, try to keep Tinkering 3-10 whole points higher than Remove Trap. Try to keep Detect Hidden skill higher than Remove Trap, but I'm not sure that it matters as long as you start with it over 50. It is fairly easy to just run through a few rounds of a macro that does Detect Hidden on each of your chests as you go along and tinkering skill is raising. Kind of gives you a break from getting hit with darts so much.
[*]I'd probably start the character with 50 Lockpicking and 50 Detect Hidden. (You need 50 of each to buy Remove Trap training. If you start with less than 50 Detect Hidden skill, use the skill on crates in a provisioner's shop and once that stops being effective, use it on the chests at the bank in Jhelom.) Buy Tinkering training and raise it to 40 by making scissors. (I couldn't find a way to buy 40 Tinkering training in New Haven, but maybe it's possible and I was just hitting the wrong trainer.) Buy the max amount of Magery or Healing skill (should be 40). Then buy the max possible amount of training in Remove Trap (probably about 25). Also buy about 25 carpentry (you will drop it later). That should make your starting skills something like this: 50 Lockpicking, 50 Detect Hidden, 40 Magery or 40 Healing, 40 Tinkering, 25 Remove Trap, 25 Carpentry. Using a soulstone add any other skills you want that character have (e.g., stealing, tracking, hiding, stealthing). However, you might want to hold off on adding the other skills until later just to get more GGS gains (the GGS gains slow down the higher your overall skill total is) while you're working on Remove Trap.
[*]You may want to try to raise your character's strength as much as possible before you start working on Remove Trap and Tinkering. I usually grab a soulstone or fragment for the character and then go do some mining some place nnear an inn (Umbra's a nice choice). Work it up to about 25 skill level, turn it down, run to the inn or recall to your house, move the skill to the soulstone or fragment, and then remove it from the soulstone or fragment. Turn the mining skill back up again and repeat the process as many times as it takes to get strength where you want it. It usually takes me about 45 minutes or so to raise strength about 40 points this way. You also don't exhaust any of the uses on a soulstone fragment, since you're not transferring the mining skill to another character.
[*]Buy a nice supply of bolts, ingots, and tinker tools and grab about 250 boards. Make 21 of the small red wooden boxes (20 must have keys). Put the 20 boxes that have keys inside one box and put all their keys on a keyring. (You can wipe the Carpentry skill off the character at this point if you want.)
[*]Make sure Tinkering skill is locked at about 40, dart trap the 20 boxes and then lock them.
[*]Start trying to remove the traps. Remove gloves and be prepared to do lots of healing because you will fail A LOT. There's a timer on using Remove Trap, so it's incredibly tedious. I usually work on the same box over and over until I get the trap off it. Then I say the number of the trap I just took out so it's recorded in my journal in case I lose track of which box I was working on. Then I move on to the next trap and repeat the process until all 20 traps are cleared.
[*]Trap all 20 boxes again, run your UOA macro to do Detect Hidden a few times if you want, and then remove all the traps. Repeat over and over and over. When Remove Trap is about 35 or so, unlock Tinkering and let your character gain Tinkering from placing the traps.
[*]When you get close to 90 with all three skills, you might try having a GM Tinker trap some other boxes for you to see if you can remove the traps. If you can without it taking many many attemps, you might consider taking the time to go to 100 Tinkering on your trap remover character at that point if it is also going to be a faction tinker and make trap deeds (make lockpicks to 92 and spyglasses to GM; can sell the spyglasses to a shipmaker). If not, then soulstone off the 90 Tinkering and just have your GM tinker do the rest of the trapping for you. (You'll have to swap characters every so often, but you might get more GGS gains with the 90 drop in your overall skills.)
[*]Don't put the character in factions until you have Remove Trap done to a usable level (i.e., 90 or higher), If you can't wait on joining factions, just be aware that if you die removing your own practice traps, you will have 20 minutes of skill loss. [/list]
Note: Since writing this post originally, I've since been working on Remove Trap on a couple more characters. I've made some modifications to my training, but thought I'd leave the above write-up as is. What I'm doing differently these days is to raise Detect Hidden to GM first by using it on trapped boxes in banks or dungeons. Create a UOA macro to use the skill on as many targets as you can. After Detect Hidden skill is finished, I then move on to working up Tinkering and Remove Trap. I've also found that I really only need to use one box, not the 20 described above if I'm just focusing on those two skills. If you decide to raise Detect Hidden as you go, though, I think you will probably want to stick to the method above where you use 20 boxes.