Ideas on how to keep bucket and lid together

[Waterdownredneck]

Hi all, sorry for the long question. I’m just a backyard hobbiest in Carlisle ON running 8 of the blue plastic pails and lids, and 5 metal pails and lids. I’m very fortunate to have access to a site with 150+ year old maples that produce very sweet sap that boils to syrup quickly. I run one bucket and one 3’ drop line on each tree. The only struggle I have is the trees are in a huge farmers field and the wind is crazy, even when ther is no wind, it’s windy :) I don’t want to go with 5gal pails/lids sitting on the ground with drop lines (although the best solution) because I like the historical feel of collecting buckets on trees. I was wondering if I could heat a drill bit and drill, but mostly melt a hole in both the top lip of the bucket and the edge of the lid and then marry the two with something like a short piece of coated copper wire, like the stuff in white coated 3 strand house wire, or anything else that would keep the lid tightish to the bucket. This should be easy with the metal buckets as I can’t crack anything, but with the plastic pails, there would be more risk of damaging the plastic then drilling/melting through the plastic lid as the lids are a sturdier plastic than the bucket material. The buckets and lids are very seldom ever lined up well at all or the lids are flipped up all the time. I tried using binder twine to secure the pail to the tree as one member suggested in one of her posts, but these trees are massive in diameter and it was a pain to deal with, and the lids still were all over the place. I even wondered about using shoe goo or something and gluing weights to the top side of the lids, (to avoid any contaminates getting in the bucket) but maybe it’s just part of sugaring and I should not worry about it. I use the greenish plastic health spiles if that helps paint the picture at all.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts. Jason.

[Daveg]

Go with the pragmatic: put the bucket on the ground and put a 4l jug full of water/ice on the lid to keep it from blowing away.. You can get free, food-grade buckets with lids at grocery stores that have a bakery department. Their icing comes in them. Also, you can put two taps in trees that old if they're bigger than 45cm in diameter. The standard is to keep next years' taps 15cm away horizontally, and 50cm vertically from any previous years' tap holes. Are your metal buckets made for sap? If so, I'm surprised that they fall off. Many brands are designed to stay on in the wind. A 20l bucket full of sap weighs over 20k.

[Michael Greer]

This is one of those problems that our grandparents figured out a long time ago. My buckets hang securely on the spout, which is firmly driven into the tree. It pretty much takes a hurricane to get those buckets to blow away. My bucket lids snap onto the rim of the bucket and hold tight 99.9% of the time. If you've got equipment that won't perform that simple task, you have the wrong equipment.