January Journal

[shane hickey]

Last year I had 7000 taps but still not much sleep thats why I have 2 evaporators and 2 wood loaders. hooking the ro to the 6x20 cut down boiling, The 5x16 has a piggyback that does a lot of shivering when coal is in the arch.

[Thad Blaisdell]

shane, how much time do you spend each day gathering? How many people are helping you?

[PATheron]

Shane- Ive been over most of my lines and I have had a good bit of damage but I think Ive got the heavies taken care of. I think your operation sounds pretty cool. Your kind of doing things as you can afford to like everyone else. Your going to love an RO. If you were doing that kind of volume without one your going to be a force to reckon with with one. Down here I did 5000 taps last year, all on vacuum with a 3 by 10 evaperator. The RO changes everything. What is a diaphram pump? Theron

[Maplewalnut]

I have lots of tubing damage this year including a bunch of laterals on the ground where something chewed straight through the tubing on the end tree and now have a lot of runs laying on the ground. Some end trees I used the end Y's with the solid barbs also so the darn tube never had sap in it , ever. Oh well, by the looks of some of them I am looking for a Porky as well as squirrels.

Picking up some cage tanks to be used for my filtrate water coming from RO. I know there a pain to clean but will have to make due for this year. It will only be water and not sap so they shouldnt slime up to quickly.

Need a few more rolls of tube at the show this weekend. 'Found' another grove of maples hiding in some pines in the corner of my property so they're getting drilled also.

[mapleack]

Spent last weekend on working on tubing, except for rainy Saturday. Fixed a bunch, added some mainline and got our first real sap ladder up, several more to go.
And yes I put the wire ties on when it was at ground level, but a section of pipe rolled on top of the wire, so I had to lean the ladder up and fix it!

[Dennis H.]

Isn't that awesome to be leaning a ladder against the wire?? Add a little breeze and it gives you this nice funny feeling in your gut that soemthing you are doing is just not right!

I had to run a mainline over a driveway to the neighbors and had no way to "Safely" do it so I just leaned the ladder against the wire. 15' in the air.

Before the mainline was up it looked like the ladder was standing up all by it self!

[mapleack]

Dennis, instead of attaching the pipe in the air, I pulled the wire out between the trees, cut it, put a loop in one end, chained it to the tree. Then I attached the strainer to the other end and cinched the wire up with a ratchet strap. Next I started tying the pipe on, put a chinese finger on it and pulled it tight with another ratchet strap. Finished tying the pipe on, with all this being done about 4ft off the ground. Next I let it all loose and hoisted up the fixed end, then the strainer/ ratchet end and tightened it up. The only reason I had to use the ladder precariously was because a bit of the pipe rolled over the wire, creating a potential high spot for sap.

[Thiems sugarshack]

Got up some pine boards on the woodshed today should be done tommarow still plenty to do before tapping around 40 days left to get everything together lets hope for a good year and some good luck

[Dennis H.]

I got my 2 gal pails today for storing syrup in. Cleaned up the filter press, I can say that thing will be the cats meow for filtering syrup.

I got the sp22 back into its vac shed. I pulled it out to see how my little bb2 worked, not as good as I thought. With the Bender milk receiver the little bb2 just couldn't keep the vac much above 17" of vac.
While I was putting the Sp22 back I couldn't get the motor to get up to speed. It just didn't have the torque. It was the original Surge 1.65HP motor. So I ordered a new 2 HP Dayton. Now we are back in business.
I was thinking about getting the Surge motor rebuild but the guy where I got the Dayton from told me that by the time I get it rebuilt with new windings and slip rings and what not that I could buy a new 2 HP Dayton again. So it may be off to the recycle pile.

So right now I am sitting pretty good with stuff being ready.

[Revi]

We've been cleaning up the trails, and the snow is a perfect hard styrofoam consistency. Makes it great for walking around. All the puddles are frozen too. Lots of deer tracks and poop. They were scarce during the season, but it looks like a lot of them made it through just fine. It is nice to get out there and walk around. I think the sun is staying up just a little later already. I noticed that it went down at 4 just before Christmas and it's setting about 5 minutes later now.