Home made oil tank arch

[Aaron Roy]

I recently acquired an older used home heading oil tank to turn into an arch. After doing some math to figure out the volume of the pans I have decided to create an arch were the pans were staggered. You should be able to see what I'm aming for in the drawing I made on the IPad and the screen shot I took. The reason I'm looking to going witht he statgered pan is that I don't usually get alot of sap during the week. Some where around 40 gallons ish. So when I get closer to the end of the boil I work about having to much surface area cooking and scorching the pan and syrup.

So my plan is that when the top one runs empty I can just put regular water in it to keep it from burning and then just work the lower syrup pan. Also doing it in this method allow be to be able to process sap on a big running week.

The drawing is not to scale and is more for concept but I'm about to start cutting and I wanted to see what you all thought. I have read other post with similar projects and I gained a ton of information from them but this was just different enough that I figured it was worth a post. The arch design could be very interesting. I will add more pictures and or sketches as the come.

[The pictures did not attach I had wanted I will try to make this work]


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[psparr]

The only drawback I can see with that plan, is keeping the heat under the pans enough. If you make it ramp up at a 90 degree angle to make it to the next pan, you might have problems with draft. But if you gradually ramp it up to the second pan, you will lose some heat there.

[optionguru]

Are you using the pans in the picture? They look wider than an oil tank.

[Aaron Roy]

The setup in the picture is not mine. It is just an example that I found of a staggered pan setup. I will be having pans made at a local fabricator. I will have the pans made to fit the arch.

[Woody77]

When I started out I had a bigger pan than the taps could keep busy I would take my sap down to about 45% and pull it at the end of the day and bulk store it till the next boil usualy in a 5gallon bucket in the beer fridge . Then add it in to the next burn at the end so the color stayed lighter .it also goes through the filter better .

[newmod]

Aaron,

your design is almost exactly how I built my oil tank arch. Check out my avatar pic. It actually worked pretty good, except that I was using carbon steel pans and they were heavy. It took 2 people to dump the top pan into the flat pan.