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...
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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.
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!