Maple Syrup 2006

Olde Fashion Maple Syrup

& Scrap Metal Recovery...

The winter of 05/06 is in the throes of death as the sun gains strength and days stretch beyond 9 hrs of feeble light that seems to hang along the southern horizon.

And with the coming of spring the ritual of "Maple Syrup" is played out again to appease the gods of the equinox much the same way that I've been sacrificing a virgin bottle of rye to appease the spirits of the solstice.

To the right is my lovely wife of 19yrs, looking like she's about to ram the camera up/down whatever orifice will cause me the greatest pain.

Given the success of the "Electric Chain-saw" experiment, I thought I'd haul out the same gear to power an electric drill to ease the grunt work of boring holes for the buckets.

And again this proves to beat the manual method of boring the holes with a hand auger.

If it was just one or two holes I wouldn't bother but by the 5th or 6th hole it's becoming more work than I care to engage in if there is an easier way.

As we just wanted enough sap to boil-down to 4 or 5 quarts of syrup, we only hung a dozen buckets.

This was done a week ago Monday in anticipation of some friends coming-up for a weekend visit to theworkshop.ca ...

If we were really serious about syrup production I think we could hang close to 150 buckets with a seasonal production of close to 350 quarts of finished product. At $20/quart and gross sales of $7,000 annually it still isn't enough to make it worth my while given how labour intensive a process this is.

And this is how it starts, one drop at a time as the buckets slowly fill.

Ideally a 10 degree (Celsius) differential with a zero-crossing is required to get the sap to flow. And we had that every day for the week leading up to our company's arrival.

Typically it would dip down to -5 or -6C at night and the temps would climb to +10 through the day.

In total I think we collected about 60 or 70 gallons of sap.

The Skidoo is parked and the tractor is now used to gather the last of the sap as the boil is well underway.

It's hard to believe that there was 2 feet of snow in spots along the trail leading into the bush just 6 days earlier.

Pictured above (to the left) is the same process we've been using for the last few years, cast iron bathtub to contain the fire, and a shop-vac configured as a blower to keep the fire just blazing. To the right is my buddy Steve with one of his son's. It's a touching image, with Steve imparting his years of wisdom to his eldest spawn, while Daniel looks on with mild dis-interest (wonder when the old-man will ever shut-up).

But as Drinking copious quantities of beer is a pre-requisite to engaging in such a venture as boiling down the sap, Steve droned on & on for hours on end, eventually repeating himself so often even I was sick of hearing about the thermo-dynamic properties of combustible materials.

In an effort to break-up the monotony of feeding the fire, Steve gathered his boys around him as they took the opportunity to fire off a few rockets.

As an aside, the young lad in the center of this image is the incarnation of pure evil... Beyond annoying everybody within ear-shot with the inane-nasal tones of that infernal Squeeze box he's clutching in glee, the little bugger climbed up onto the tractor and proceeded to fiddle with every control in reach of the operators seat until he had it started and almost ran-over his father.

Once the sap was boiled-off and the women folk were put to task on filtering and bottling, I figured it would be a good time to reduce these rims to a more usable form.

Automotive alloy rims are an excellent source of Aluminum but contained in a shape that resists blows from the heaviest maul or even the crushing pressures of the wood splitter given their circular shape and considerable heat-treatment as a function of their application.

These 2 rims are the last of 4 that were literally melted down over a 1 hour run as we just pounded the fuel to the fire to get some real heat happening.

It would appear that we may have been a bit over zealous in how much wood we were applying to the fire as the tub started to show signs of destabilizing as a series of cracks formed and liquid Aluminum started running out in all directions from the tub.

My personal attorney and adviser was quite explicit that I advise readers against such practices as depicted above given their inherent danger...

To that end I direct you to read the disclaimer linked at the bottom of this page (to the right).

Return to Main