This week’s weather is exactly what we need for the start of the 2015 tapping season. Nice hard freeze in the single digits and teens for much of the week. I am planning on tapping 25 trees and using gravity tubing, basically the same as last year. I do have one improvement over last year’s concrete block arch. I have 100 fire bricks that I am going to line the arch with. I will post pictures when I build it. That is a task for this coming weekend. I am also making a DIY tool for attaching the tubing to the fittings. I will post pictures of that as well when I finish it. I am patterning it after one I saw somewhere on this forum that used a hand slide clamp.