What Was I Thinking

[Haynes Forest Products]

So what was the funniest stupid just shake your head and laugh thing you did this year.

Ill start ...........I put a sheet of plywood over my round bottom tank to hold the releaser and I cut a 12X24 square hole in it for the sap to run in as the releaser dumps the sap. As the releaser fills it switches from tank to tank with a big slurping sound and the full tank dumps about 4 gallons of sap. Well I had just pumped out the tank and I had droped a small lid in the tank so I leaned over the tank and wiggled myself in to the hole to get the lid and you got it I heard this slurping sound ............Did I mentioned that I can be a big IDIOT at times

[jrthe3]

i have i pipe that runs from my head tank (east wall) across shack to the evap (west wall) this pipe has a union on either end for ez clean
so with out even thinking i reached up to turn head tank as valve open i got a sap shower a lot of sap comes out of a 1 inch line i a few seconds

[jdj]

Made first batch of syrup for the day, put it in the tub to run it through the filter press and flipped the switch, walked away to check on the evaporator........darn forgot to put the filter papers in the press!!!!!! WHAT A MESS TO SAY THE LEAST!!!

[3rdgen.maple]

Take a corner too fast with a full gathering tank on the pto. It is amazing how far a full tank can ski through the snow.

[RileySugarbush]

Our head tank doesn't have a float limit switch.

Three times this season, three different guilty parties.

Nuff said!

[white mt]

I have made my fair shair of mistakes when it comes to maple and I have concluded one stedfast fact the hard way, NEVER RUSH ANYTHING IN MAPLE .Like leave your hose in the bulk tank and the hose falls down and empty your tank for you .Dan

[Haynes Forest Products]

Riley My head tank is over the steam hood and now we just call it washing down the steam hood its now standard operating procedure. Its the same sound you hear when you stand behind a cow in the barn and it take a leak on ya.........opps I mean some other person

[KenWP]

Decided to move to Quebec and make maple syrup. Has been a month of watching little holes in trees waiting for water to run out. I also joined this site and spent a lot of time tweaking a evaporator. Has lots left to do like figure out how to make a flue pan and maybe get over 3 gallons a hours. Oh and increase my tap numbers up to 135 or 140 taps. Seems to increase every time I take a drill and a hammer to the woods.

[RileySugarbush]

Haynes,

Our head tank has a one inch hole near the top where an old sight glass used to go, so when we get distracted it looks as well as sounds like that cow you (or some other person) know so well!

[Hurdhaven Farm]

Overflowing header tanks seem to be a popular one and I am guilty of doing this three times this season. The only thing that saved me from losing a lot of sap is my transfer pump is slow. Telling myself that sap spilled on the sugarhouse floor "looks" like more than it is, doesn't seem to work.

[Russell Lampron]

By recycling the concentrate back to the bulk tank I only used the bottom 4 inches of my feed tank. No worries of overfilling it here.

[Haynes Forest Products]

The one nice thing about nice fresh sap on the floor is it keeps it clean foe a few days. This year I plan on installing a return line back to the storage tank. My head tank has a cover with a vent that will allow me to hook right into it. The problem is its a easy and simple fix and that the problem its so easy that I cant get myself to fix it but when I do you can bet Ill be the proudest person Ill even overfill it just to show everyone how smart I'am. They will all crowd around admire how it only took 12 years to do it.

[peacemaker]

i didnt over flow the head tank this year but it was the first year with floats and a real evap one morning i flooded the pans forgot i dropped the sap float open pumped into the head tank and right into my nice sweet pan i even went out to see if the pump was working cause 1 inch line in 1 inch line out does gain on the tank lol one nice thing i pumped all that sweet back up to the head tank and it was like boiling 3 %sap finally
i also boiled 3 hours with out switching the plug dumped raw sap into the front pan all night couldnt figure out why i would get close to syrup then lose it moved the plug and my whole front pan went to syrup 3 gal draw in 15 minutes lol
good way to sweeten the flue pan though lol

[michiganfarmer]

we just got a bunch of snow. where I drive out of the woods is on a side hill. I used the pick up when I should have used the tractor. The truck slid sidways into a snow bank that was piled up with the tractor, and the snow was hard. It caved the side of my pick up box in. I was stuck, and had to get the tractor anyway.

[michiganfarmer]

the kids knocked the rear window out of the truck loading firewood, and my 17 year old tried backing the trailor up with the truck, jack knifed it, and caved in the fender well on the truck

[Jeff E]

Each night I pressure wash my bulk storage tanks right after getting them emptied. The sap comes into the sugar house via 2- 1" lines, into a stock tank, then pumped through a filter up into the bulk tank, via another 1" hose to a PVC 'hook' that hangs into the tank.

Well I removed that hook, hung it over a ladder I was standing on and started cleaning away. My wife was filtering syrup at the time. Well, sap came in, filling up the stock tank and the pump started pumping sap up to the PVC hook and dumping it on the floor, about 30 gallons per minute. With the pressure washer going, I didnt hear it, and my wife, being very confident in her man (he must be doing that on purpose) or being to scared to yell at me (that would be sad) didnt say anything for about 2 minutes.

A good floor rinsing with 3%. Thank goodness I put in floor drains!

[maple flats]

I took a 550 gal flat bottom plastic storage tank up to put it in place for my expanded bush. I loaded it sideways so it stuck up almost 6' in the air. I was going to tie it down but said "no, I'll just drive slow" I got up in the hills towards where it was going and a side wind flipped it out and down onto someone's lawn. It was rather steep to push back up, with deep snow from snowplows pushing big drifts off the road. It took two of use almost 30 minutes to get it loaded. This time I tied it even though I only had about a mile left to go. I'm just glad the garbage truck behind me didn't have to run it over to avoid steering around it and into oncoming traffic, but allas it didn't hit the road, just the small ravine beside the road, and the garbage truck was able to avoid hitting my truck as I quickly steered to the side and stopped.

[sapman]

I've thought about this thread for awhile, and couldn't pinpoint the dumbest thing I did because there were so many! I finally narrowed it down to forgetting a valve off on the concentrate line to my evap. feed tank. Probably shouldn't be a valve there in the first place, but it does come in handy sometimes. Anyhow, the RO ran a minute or two til I came back around and had 8% sap mist coating the RO room! Fortunately, the hose had a weak spot near an insert fittining, so all I had to do was shorten it a couple inches.

Tim

[Dave Y]

What was I thinking? 3000 taps on a 3x12 with out an RO. Yea that was it!

[Hurdhaven Farm]

Dumbest thing I did was the last day of the season (4/16) while cleaning everything up. I had drained the evaporator and was finishing off the 5 gallon mix of nearly ready to almost sap in the turkey fryer. This was taking a while, but no matter I had plenty of cleanup,washing buckets, tanks and evaporator. I was using the hot water hose up by the house and checking on the turkey fryer when I brought stuff back and forth(300 foot round trip). Near the end I saw the temp was 214, figured I had time for one more trip. Well, you guessed it, boiling over pot and syrup on the floor. When I build another sugarhouse it will have a sink and hot and cold running water in it!

[KenWP]

How about 150 taps on a 16x18 inch pan. No wonder I had to boil 15 hours a day or more to get everything done.

[Dave Y]

Ken WP,
Thats not bad try boiling for 96 consecitive hours with out shuting down. And firing every 5 mins.

[Brent]

My turn

We're in the machine tool business and have to control coolant levels in the machines. So when we put the feed tank in the rafters of the sugar shack. I had a shop guy make up a box with some relays to connect to a couple of float switches to put in the tank. But they never got tweaked to work quite right and every time I went to the sugar shack I thought, "should I fix the switches or light the fire" I always lit the fire.

I put the tank in the rafters right above the firing doors on the evaporator. Do I need to elaborate?

I think I have had about 20 cold showers of sticky sap when I forgot to manually turn the pump off. Visitors however love the smell of the carmelized syrup that splashed on the front of the arch.

Maybe next year.

[Haynes Forest Products]

OK its back to me. I have been looking for a low volume vacuum pump for a bottler Im making. I got 6 vacuum bottler heads cheap the other day so after bidding on and losing 10 or so pumps I went to my friendly scrap yard and what do I see 3 dumpsters full of home Oxygen Generators that have 110volt duel piston low pressure vacuum/compressers like new. Well I hauled the first load home today of 75 and tomarrow Ill get the rest I paid $2.00 each and they have all sorts of valves fittings and scrap Aluminum.............And the wife said ............. WHAT WERE YOU THINKING

[KenWP]

I bite what the hell you going to do with them all. Wish we had junk yards here.

[Sugarmaker]

Man where do I start, so many and so little time:)
How about starting a small fire in the rig with near syrup in the front pan and the partitions are blocked off too, the fire was built to keep off the near zero chill while I went to bed. It will be fine I said! Needless to say the next morning I had three hours of pan scrubbing to do to get the charred, burnt,black crusty charred syrup and maple caramel out of the center sections of the front pan! Just kept trying to smile (which was hard) through the whole thing.:(

Chris

[Haynes Forest Products]

KenWP I was willing to pay $35.00 each for a vac pumps for my bottlers so when I found the 150 of them and made a deal for all of them for $300.00 I couldnt stop myself. I took one completly apart and there is $1.20 of clean alum, $0.45 of dirty Alum, $0.20 of wire, coils that a scrap yard will pay me. 8 hose clamps (1) 24 volt solenoid valve, (4) plastic check valves and the compressor so Ill see what I can do on Ebay. And as the wife said W T H W Y T

[PATheron]

You guys are funny, you know why we all do these things is becouse we work. Your not doing anything your not making any mistakes. I went out this year and checked my double bernard releaser like I do every morning and was half asleep from being up all night and pulled the dump flap back to see if there was any ice in it. Just happened to be the side that had the 26 inches of vac on it. Bad move. Releaser sounded like a bomb went off. Destroyed the linkage on top of the releaser completely. That vac is powerfull as heck. Must have been living right becouse Jerry showed up the next day with a belly releaser and we changed it right out and I was all set. Weve filter pressed syrup right onto the ground many times this season, Dumped 3000 gallons worth of concentrate becouse couldnt hardly boil it. Filled a drum to find it leaked like crazy. Put the inards back in the double bernard backwards and wondered why the floats were hanging up. Oh well, gotta be tough if you want to be a sugar maker I guess or at least persistant. Theron

[Thompson's Tree Farm]

Man, It is a good thing we all manage to spoil, dump, burn or whatever all this sap and syrup. Just think how low prices would be if we turned it all into marketable product!

[tyrod2]

I was putting my last load of sap in my holding tank for the day and my tank was full so I started filling my over head tank to make room. Got over head tank full and holding tank out side full wit 1/8 inch from running over. Feeling good and lucky that I got all my sap unloaded in my tanks I started boiling. Later when I steped out of my sugar house I saw sap running down the road. The holding tank out side was running over. I forgot to shut the valve to the holding tank over head and it back flowed back into the tank outside and run it over. I did not feel so good and lucky any moor.

[KenWP]

We have to add up all the spilled syrup and sap on here and see how much was lost. I even had a sap spill a couple of times. First one was when I used to big holding tank for the first time and founf out it never actually held liquid but dripped slow but sure all night and the next time when I was draining to tank and being near the bottom it poured so slow I left it to do other things and lost everything out of the tank. Owell such is life in the maple world.

[ennismaple]

My dumba$$ moment was at 2:30 a.m. after a very long day boiling. I saw that a few drops of syrup were coming from around the threads of the pipe where syrup comes off the finishing pan. I put a pipe wrench on the pipe to tighten the threads.... and broke the solder on the pan!!! We had to drain the pan, get it off the arch for the night and then it took 2 hours the following day to get it fixed. Lesson learned - don't touch a warm pan!

[Brian Ryther]

The fourth time I burnt the syrup pans this season was the worst. (Yes Fourth) The first time was from shallow pans, my fault. the next two were from dark nasty sap, the fourth was my fault. I screwed up and left the valve open from the head tank to the flue pan open. I filled the head tank and over night it found it's way to the flue pan. So there was an extra 200 gal of sap in the flue pan when I started to fire the evap. I wanted to drain some of the sap into the syrup pan before it began to boil so it didn't over flow on the floor. I added sap to bolth sides of the syrup pan. This pushed the concentrated sweet to the middle of the syrup pan. I was watching the themometer on the draw off, It was holding steady at 212. Twenty minuites later I smelled trouble. Then I heard the distinctive flop, flop flop, of burning syrup. I Opened the doors, turned off the blowers and opened the draw off valve all of the way. I poured 10 gallons of warm sap behind the burning syrup. Then I looked under the syrup pan. I could see the metal bending and twisting, then I saw the sodder fall out of three compartments followed by syrup. I stayed calm and began calling every # in my phone. First to look for a new pan, then to look for someone to repair it. Bill at leader in Rutland sayd if I gt there first thing Sat am and there were no costomers he would try to fix it. I empyed the pan and cleaned it. Put in the back of my truck. and at 3am headed for rutland. I was home by noon on Saturday, and was boiling by 1pm. I figure it cost me $200 dollars including gass to make the repair. I was able to make three barrels after the fix.

[Clan Delaney]

We have to add up all the spilled syrup and sap on here and see how much was lost.

Add a quart to that. :mad: I was bottling last night and knocked over the blender jar I use to measure and fill the bottles. I think I shed a tear as I watched it s l o w l y disappear between the floorboards. (I also wondered, if I had a filter press, could I just mop that all up....) It doesn't sound like much, but it is when all you've got is 5 gallons!

[Haynes Forest Products]

Put me down for at least 10 gallons spilled washed away during cleaning and yes I left the drawoff open and became distracted :cry: Every time friends would come back from collecting and see the wet clean floor in the evap room they knew I screwd up.

[sapman]

I could also add an unknown amount of syrup to the pot. Actually dozed off one night for a few minutes at about 2-3am. Sure glad I awoke pretty quickly! The auto-draw probably ran a half gallon or more on the floor.

Tim

[evansglenn]

Well the season went pretty good, and I guess I didn't really have a no-brainer good enought to embarrass myself with, but I will tell you this...

As soon as the season was over, I took a well deserved break. Me and a co-worker of mine headed to South Texas to meet up with an old co-worker and go hog hunting. One morning for breakfast we stopped at an IHOP. Mind you, in the truck I had 4 cases of syrup from this year that I brought down with me because people in Texas don't have access to this "Liquid Gold" like we do. Anyhow, I was wanting some pancakes, so I ordered some, and on the table was a syrup tray that had a variety of syrups. One of these was clearly labeled "Maple Syrup." So I asked the waitress if she could warm me some for when the food arrived, which she did. Folks, this was not Maple Syrup! It wasn't even good fake stuff. When she came back and asked how the pancakes were, I said, "The pancakes, oh they are really good." "Well what do you think of that maple syrup," she asked. "Well Ma'am," I said. "Since you brought it up, this is the saddest excuse I have ever seen for Maple Syrup!" Then she said, that some people just don't care for the flavor of the Maple Syrup, and that it is not a very popular item. I told her when it tastes like that, it's no wonder. She insisted that it was Maple Syrup, until I filled her in on a little secret. She then apoligized.

So the moral of the story... If you go to IHOP, get an omlet. :o

[Thompson's Tree Farm]

Just read a recent article on the first IHOP opened in Vt. Only one in the US to serve real maple syrup. Seems like a no brainer to serve the real stuff to me, especially in the states that produce syrup. But hey, what do I know....

[Haynes Forest Products]

I do the Waffel House thing every sunday and for about 3 years my two kids would bring in the little plastic jugs from the truck. After about of a year the waitres asked if we wanted to keep a bigger container behind the counter. The one thing I like is being able to see my food cooked so im not leaving some small jug around to be defiled.

[KenWP]

The neighbours wife figured I was crazy this spring as they watched me from across the road boil for 6 weeks trying to make syrup from what they figured was only soft maples. Here in Quebec if it's not a sugar they do not tap it. He finially asked me how the hell I could be makeing syrup. He believed me when I explained my silvers had more sugar then the sugars when I tested it. But he was really amazed when he found out I was carrying sap in 5 gallon buckets almost a half mile out from the sugar maples out back. He was even more amazed when I gave him some yesterday for letting me use his rotortiller to work up the garden.

[Brent]

I know first hand how crazy you gotta be. When we first move to this lot 5 years back we used 5 gallon water cooler jugs to lug the sap from the woods.
I recon a bit over 1200 feet. One in each hand and one in a back pack. Did that two years before we got the gator.

[BryanEx]

I figured there would be a thread like this somewhere. This past summer while finishing my wood shed I got carried away while strapping the roof for metal. Ended up strapping myself on the roof because I could no longer fit between the strapping and the rafters to get back to my ladder. One has to yell really really loud for their wife to hear them indoors. Problem solved once my able-bodied assistant relocated the ladder outside the shed but I'm still trying to live it down given I work in new home construction. :rolleyes:

[KenWP]

Couple of years ago I was doing some bobcat work and filling a deep hole. The bucket was full of dirt and I went to dump it in the hole towards the middle and the previous dirt sunk under the front wheels of the bobcat and it tipped forward. So of course I coudn't get out and was to embarrassedto phone for help so I had to wait untill the other guy working nearbye noticed me and could pull the back of the bobcat back down and out of the hole. Of course he wanted to take pictures of me first. Lesson learned.

[Haynes Forest Products]

Have you ever forgot to lower the dump gate on a 57 Chevy 5 yd dump full of stumps that you backed right tight to the pile and pulled the pto out and watched the woods turn to blue sky and settle back in the seat at 45 degree angle:o :mad: :emb:

[BryanEx]

Hahaha... I really hope someone got a picture of that. Out of curiosity, how did you get the truck back down?

I guess my current operation could go in this thread as well. I'm most certainly the only on here that actually runs around putting sap BACK INTO the buckets. I run a brew your own syrup operation with two families coming out both Saturday and Sunday in season. If the sap has not been running hard enough I need to collect during the week and bury 5 gallon pails in the bush. I use that sap to top up the buckets if needed so everyone can run around collecting their own sap when they arrive. It seems so bass-ackward to me but it's also been very profitable for 45 taps and a lot of good times. Hoping to add a second evaporator for 2011 and double the number of guests.

[Haynes Forest Products]

I was 21 at the time and if I went forward the truck went higher and It was past coming down by gravity and I kept trying to run it in reverse BUT I knew that if I kept ripping and roaring in reverse that the tranny would lock up Because I backed into a pile of sand the same year and stalled the truck and it locked in reverse and had to pull the drive shaft so I was BEING carful:rolleyes: I got out and started throwing dirt and crap up into the front to get the weight to let the dump down. After about an hr it worked and I dumped the stumps went back to the job site. When they said I fell asleep in the truck I just let them rip on me and agreed:emb:

[dnap63]

The dump truck in the air has happened to me too. I had a pretty good load on the truck and forgot to remove one of the chains that held the gate. I raised the box and up came the front wheels. When I got out I could stand under the front bumper. Of course the first thing I did was take a picture and hung it up with the caption "think you are having a bad day". I had to use an excavator to pop the gate open and getly remove a bit of the load and set the truck back down on its wheels.