October Journal

I know I'm a few hours early for October but it's about time to start the journals again. First day back in the woods for me. Beautiful day, perfect weather. Spent the day walking mainlines picking up old tubing from last years work before the leaves fall. Got 1/2 the bush done. Some downed trees but nowhere near the moose damage we had last year so far. All in all, looking good. I sprung out of bed at 5:30 with a smile on my face and will head to bed with the same smile. I friggin' love sugar season and its in full swing on weekends for me :cool:

Have 12,000 feet of mainline and wire to install (wire and line is pulled but have to string it up), starting Saturday I'll be living in the woods until its done!

Yesterday I ordered all the fittings I need to build a preheater. hoping to get about 7-8 more gph.
We'll see ,I will run a test boil before it gets really cold out.

Have done nothing maple all summer. I have cleaned the sugar house and am getting ready to install a wood stove though

Going to be bricking my new 2x5 arch this weekend.
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Been working periodically in the sugar woods cleaning up and reopening travel paths. Ran mainline wire in my North facing woods today adding about 500 feet. In my south facing woods I am hoping to get about 500 more feet run this week. Plan to put my mainline up next weekend.

Got about 100 miles of wire and pipe ran since mid May, including about 10,000' of 4" fusion,18,000' of 3" fusion, and 25,000' of 3\8" cable. Last week we started running tubing, got in 220 rolls, only 1800 rolls left to go :lol:

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Originally Posted by Chris_In_Vermont

Got about 100 miles of wire and pipe ran since mid May, including about 10,000' of 4" fusion,18,000' of 3" fusion, and 25,000' of 3\8" cable. Last week we started running tubing, got in 220 rolls, only 1800 rolls left to go :lol:

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How many taps you going to have there?

I believe this is Glen Goodriches new sugar house in Eden Vt. I think they are installing 50,000 taps a year for the next 4 years for the total of 200,000 taps.There is going to be a tubing seminar there in Eden the first sat. in November. They are going to run the sugar house in Cabot too.

Yep Brian nailed it. I'm Glenn's woods crew foreman for this project. 50,000ish a year for the next 3 years for hopefully around 200,000. That's just estimates from a timber cruise, hard to be exact over 5000 acres but I bet it'll be close.
Amazing thing about this woods is no trucking. We're going to pump about half of it, and the rest will run straight in. That in itself is huge.
Sugarhouse is coming along, equipment starting to show up, it's coming together.

I thought I saw a new sugar house going up on Rt 2 in East Montpelier or was it Plainfield, looked pretty good sized. Sounds like that tubing seminar is the same day as Bascoms auction.

Yes there is a new sugar house in Marshfield Vt on Rt2. I think they have a lot of taps also. I heard they sell some sap by RO ing the sap to 15% freeze it and then send it to Japan to make maple water or sap soda.

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Originally Posted by Chris_In_Vermont

Yep Brian nailed it. I'm Glenn's woods crew foreman for this project. 50,000ish a year for the next 3 years for hopefully around 200,000. That's just estimates from a timber cruise, hard to be exact over 5000 acres but I bet it'll be close.
Amazing thing about this woods is no trucking. We're going to pump about half of it, and the rest will run straight in. That in itself is huge.
Sugarhouse is coming along, equipment starting to show up, it's coming together.

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Chris- Good Luck, it will be fun watching the progress of your team. Keep us updated

Mike

So the last two days I, made a deal to sell sap from as many taps as I can put in this year, acquired a 750 gallon stainless steel tank, and a releaser. Tomorrow I meet with someone who is interested in as much syrup as I can send send him... one excited sap monkey.

Wow! Double Wow! I will be walking several local PA sugarbushes with Glenn during the Friday LEME event. Always impressed with Glenn. Some dream it, some do it!
More pictures are welcome.
regards,
Chris

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Originally Posted by Maple Man 85

Have 12,000 feet of mainline and wire to install (wire and line is pulled but have to string it up), starting Saturday I'll be living in the woods until its done!

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Goal met all 12,000 feet installed time to push and get the laterals in!!! Only 90 800ft rolls to go!:o

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Originally Posted by Maple Man 85

Goal met all 12,000 feet installed time to push and get the laterals in!!! Only 90 800ft rolls to go!:o

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Don't forget to plan on $1.50/lb., or less syrup just around the corner.

I've been thinking about adding a storage barn for about 4 years but never seem to get the green saved ahead to do it. This past Monday I changed direction, instead of a 30 x 40' barn with room for lots of my farm equipment, a storage loft for more, a space to build a walk in cooler and 1 corner for a blacksmith shop, I ordered a 14x28 shed. It is being built right now and I designed it to have the ability to drive my tractor in it. It will have a hip roof for more room for storage but the headroom will only be 5' in the center on one end and 4 feet for the section over the tractor. Then over the next few years I'll add a walk in cooler just off the east side, a blacksmith shop off the back and a shed lean to roof on the west side to park some of my farm equipment on the west side. A set of double doors will be on the south for the tractor to go in, and a man door on the west and one on the north (for the future blacksmith shop).
So, I've been moving a whole lot of stuff from where it will set. I had loads of farm equipment , a releaser, a vacuum pump, a 300 gal SS tank, 2 plastic leg tanks, a canoe and a pile of logs for my sawmill. That is all now gone. Now I have a large 3 stem basswood tree I need to take down, one of which has a real bad lean the I need to get it to fall about 90 degrees from the lean, a large maple with a real bad spot of rot going up at least 8' and a large cherry also with a long badly rotted trunk on one side about 10-12' from the ground up. Any of those could easily fall on the shed if I left them.
Once they are gone, I'll remove the top soil where the shed will go, put plastic down to help keep moisture from below working up and then put down 6" crushed stone and rent a power plate tamper to pack it. All this in the next 10 days.
I've got to get back to it now.

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Originally Posted by Maple Man 85

Goal met all 12,000 feet installed time to push and get the laterals in!!! Only 90 800ft rolls to go!:o

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Its always satisfying to reach a goal like that. Unfortunately my goal of installing 3/16ths on a slope I have never installed on before was grossly optimistic. But I'm almost done if that counts for anything!! Good luck with your install, beautiful time to be in the woods

On Sunday, I did a test boil with my new preheater. I tried to incorporate my vent from the top of the preheater with a tank level gauge.
The results were less than satisfactory; too much air spitting out the top of the tubing. Today I reconfigured my tank gauge into the feed line
and I'm going to run my vent line way up in the rafters and then return it to the float box. As for improved boil, I got a little over
60 gph; up from around 50, with the extra boil rate now it's time to go looking for more trees................

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Originally Posted by markcasper

Don't forget to plan on $1.50/lb., or less syrup just around the corner.

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Not really concerned with bulk price mine is all retailed or made into value added products at our sugarhouse. We actually bought barrels just to keep up with demand. Will keep it in the back of my mind though...

Getting ready to leave the house and head up to the mountain. 13 trees across lines that need to be cut up. More than usual but I'll take it over the moose damage we had last year. We'll be ready to start working the lines next weekend.

The basswood are all down, no major events dropping the bad leaner, but it did land about 15' from my old over full shed. But no harm. I limbed the mill's stems and bucked them into 18' logs so my excavator/thumb could carry and stack them. I have 2 calls out to large sawmills to see what they pay far basswood. I have about 800BF international scale, if they don't want it or the price is too low it will be evaporator fuel. If that's the case, I might saw and try to sell some to those who whittle.

Still cleaning up the woods for the new install, picked up mainline tubing yesterday, woods walk with Glen Goodrich today.

Rain all day today according to the forecast. Still have some trees to remove, what was already dropped is all cleaned up, even the sugar maple that had to be sacrificed, it was surrounded by a basswood major limb on each side about 30' up, which made it necessary to remove the maple so I could take the big basswood down. Now I have 2 trees, a large maple and a large cherry and 3 big hemlocks to take down. The large maple (about 36" dbh) and the cherry (about 30" dbh) both have large cavities in the trunk. I'm trying to decide how to safely take them down. I don't have enough on any side to cut a dependable hinge nor is there enough solid wood to use wedges to push either tree over. I'm thinking I might use a ladder to hook a good cable up high, then pull from over 100' away using my brother's 10,000# skid steer with a 8800# pull logging winch on it, with my brother running the winch as I cut the tree. Still studying that idea. It looks like all 3 hemlocks should be no issue, each has little or no lean and I have openings to drop them in. All 3 are about 24-28" dbh. They will make some good lumber. On trees like that I drop them with the aid of my excavator. I just pull the machine up to near the tree with my blade on the off side. Then I raise the boom up high, and the dipper as high as I can and still get good force on the tree. Then I put pressure on the tree and finally I push the blade down to get the full force potential. That has worked perfectly since I first tried it when I had to remove a 56" dbh red maple to make room for my solar system. This usually leaves me pushing about 12-13' up off the ground with the full force of the hydraulics. I can reach higher but can't get as much force that high as I can at 12-13'.
Last night I drew out the plans for my walk in cooler, which I plan to build next year. It will be 8x14 X7' high and I'll use a "cool bot" to keep the temp in the 35-38 F range. It will have 6" foam insulation in the walls extending down to cover the edge of the concrete slab floor, 9" in the ceiling and at least 2" under the slab floor. A cool bot is a special control with run an air conditioner cold enough to hold those temps as long as the door is not opened too often. In my case I'd only open it on average about once every 3-6 weeks, they are reported to work on ones opened up to a max of 3-4x a day, but no more. According to cool bot specs I could run a 12,000 BTU air conditioner to make this work.
When I need to open the door it will take a while to get a full barrel out but once I close it again, any remaining syrup will already be cold which should help. It can then take several hours if needed to get back down to my set temperature.

We have around 650 rolls of tubing installed. Far enough ahead of the dropline crew we took today to start building a pile of stainless steel manifolds to tie our mainlines into the conductor\ wet-dry systems. Hard to believe October is nearly over, seems like it flew by. Looks like running tubing tomorrow in the rain... That'll cut down on the roll count.

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Originally Posted by Chris_In_Vermont

We have around 650 rolls of tubing installed. Far enough ahead of the dropline crew we took today to start building a pile of stainless steel manifolds to tie our mainlines into the conductor\ wet-dry systems. Hard to believe October is nearly over, seems like it flew by. Looks like running tubing tomorrow in the rain... That'll cut down on the roll count.

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Feel your pain there, We've been running laterals in the rain, wind advisories and soon snow showers based on the weekend forecast. Seems like the weather has not been favorable for outside work. Either that I'm a terrible planner:lol:

500 ft of 1-1/4 main installed. Running 3/4 and 1 inch branches today. Tomorrow hoping to get 950 ft of main line installed in other woods.

We got 4x 500 foot rolls of 2" dryline rolled out from our pump to the remote releaser on the weekend. Those rolls are **** heavy! I've still got bruises all over my arms. There was no good way to roll it out along the mainline so we put a rod through the rolls and hung it off the forks of the tractor. Brute force and ignorance was the only way to get it done! Once unrolled we discovered that 500ft of 2" mainline has more friction force than the pulling force of 2 strong guys! In a few spots we could get the truck, ATV or tractor to help pull it but in most places all the could do was break it up into smaller pulls.

We still have 1000 feet of steel and 1" mainline to put up plus about 20 rolls of 5/16 to stretch before winter. Lots to get done!

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Originally Posted by Chris_In_Vermont

We have around 650 rolls of tubing installed. Far enough ahead of the dropline crew we took today to start building a pile of stainless steel manifolds to tie our mainlines into the conductor\ wet-dry systems. Hard to believe October is nearly over, seems like it flew by. Looks like running tubing tomorrow in the rain... That'll cut down on the roll count.

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How do you do your manifolds?

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Originally Posted by Sunday Rock Maple

How do you do your manifolds?

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Sorry for the sideways pics I’m on my cellphone and can’t for the life of me figure out how to rotate them.

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Originally Posted by ennismaple

We got 4x 500 foot rolls of 2" dryline rolled out from our pump to the remote releaser on the weekend. Those rolls are **** heavy! I've still got bruises all over my arms. There was no good way to roll it out along the mainline so we put a rod through the rolls and hung it off the forks of the tractor. Brute force and ignorance was the only way to get it done! Once unrolled we discovered that 500ft of 2" mainline has more friction force than the pulling force of 2 strong guys! In a few spots we could get the truck, ATV or tractor to help pull it but in most places all the could do was break it up into smaller pulls.

We still have 1000 feet of steel and 1" mainline to put up plus about 20 rolls of 5/16 to stretch before winter. Lots to get done!

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I know how you feel. 2” in coils pulls mean. If you have a road or field, uncoil the whole roll first with an atv then take it into the woods. It helps.
I used to think 2” was the hardest pulling stuff ever. Till we started doing 3/8” cable. And 3” pipe. And 4” pipe. The 4” is the worst. It weighs 2lbs per foot so a 500’ length is 1000lbs, half a ton. We put 4-5 guys on it and try real hard to always pull downhill.

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New roof on my sugar shack! Very happy that when it gets warm out and the snow on the roof starts melting I won't get drips down the back of my neck anymore! Yay!

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Originally Posted by Chris_In_Vermont

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Sorry for the sideways pics I’m on my cellphone and can’t for the life of me figure out how to rotate them.

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Here you go can't change the size. Attachment 16795Attachment 16794