Luckily for me, I had last Friday off to prep the evaporator for our first maple sap boil last weekend. There were 2 major project on deck that needed to be completed. First was to modify my poly 35 gallon leg tank to make it a little more user friendly. For anyone familiar with these tanks they give you a small 4-5””” diameter hole at the top of the tank (sorry no before photo) which makes it nearly impossible for you to clean the inside of the tank and makes it a major chore to install the bulkhead style fitting on the outlet of the leg tank. I read on the internet last year about how people were modifying these tanks to accept a 5-gallon bucket, and basically cutting a big hole on top. Unfortunately I did not have the gumption to cut this tank last year. After the pain that was to clean I figured I would go for it this year. The first thing I did was to cut the bottom 3” off of one of my food grade buckets with a saber saw equipped with a fine cutting wood blade. The saw made quick work of the bucket, and because the 5-gallons buckets are tapered I knew I could trace the outline of the bucket on top of the tank to give me the hole size for the top of the 35-gallon tank.
This was not as easy as I thought, because I did a flat cut on the bucket when I should have used more of a radius to follow the curve of the tank. This is hard to explain in words and I have a lack of photos but anyone that does this modification will understand. After I roughly traced the outline on the tank, I drilled a starter hole the size of the saber saw blade and made my initial cut. I found myself having to go back and widen by initial cut at the two sides in order to fit the bucket into the tank. I made a couple small cuts and would check the fit until it was snug. Once you can fit the bucket in the tank you just push the bucket further down into the tank to tighten the fit.
As you can see form the photos below you end up with a pretty tight fit.
With my sap storage tank ready to go. It was time to focus on the stack for my WF Mason 2×3 Hobby Evaporator. I unwrapped the tarp off the steel section of my evaporator and installed a new 6” diameter, 24” long base section on top last years elbow. For anyone who has not used lock seem stove pipe it is a paint in the butt. First make sure you wear gloves when working with stove pipe. Its easy to get cut if your are not careful. I did read a trick last year that I figured I would pass along. If you push the two seams together while pushing them down you change the circular shape of the pipe into more of a heart shape that makes it easier to start the lock seam of the stove pipe.
Next I cheated and slapped last years section of stove pipe on the newer section. As you can see there is a noticeable difference in just one year of the stove pipe being exposed to the weather. I have a total of 6’ of stove pipe on this outdoor rig. The rule of thumb I read was 2’ of pipe in height for every 1’ of pan length so in my case my WF Mason 2×3 Hobby Evaporator has a 3’ long pan so 6’ seems to work fine creating plenty of draft. In the background you can see my Garden Bean Trellis serving double duty as support for the smoke stack. I basically have two 6’ section of lightweight conduit attached to the trellis at what end and attached to the smoke stack with some wire. Pretty basic, but serves the purpose until we get a sugar shack.
All that remains is to set the pans and fill with sap. Saturday we boiled during the day for 4-hours or so. We had about 40 or so gallons of maple sap previously frozen solid by the polar vortex that we were able to slightly thaw overnight in the house by Saturday morning.
We stoked the fire got a rapid boil going and then slowly added large block of maple ice.
Thawing that much ice forced me to keep a good eye on our stack temp and the sap in the pans so I could maintain a rapid boil.
Sunday I started late thanks to daylight savings time and got in my first night boil.
There is something special about boiling at night. Its hard to describe but there seems to be more steam rising in the moonlight and the wood in the firebox seems to glow just a little bit brighter and feel a little bit warmer.
I was not quite sure how well we did where everything was frozen, and we had some additional sap run last weekend but I be we went through between 50 or so gallons of sap over 4 hours each day so we probably had an evaporation rate of 6 gallons per hour despite melting ice. It was a good weekend that left us with about 4 gallons of sweet.
