Searching and looking for traces
And dreaming of that socket.....
Slightly more seriously, I went to @sirbike's farm to help make some maple syrup and saw his bike. Sorry, I couldn't resist the title of this thread. The overriding reason for this project was to replace all the brake lines with (omg, was that an unintended pun?) braided stainless steel lines. He is working with Galfer to come up with every single flexible section, and since they did not offer parts, sirbike had to remove and send them the entire brake system...yes, every single part, calipers, SMC, etc. In addition to the parts, he had to label each and every piece, he made a wooden mock-up and strapped all the pieces in place, and took pictures. When Galfer got the whole package, they were able to make engineering drawings for each flex hose and will be able to make pieces for anyone when this project is finished.
If you have questions, PM him and maybe he will post the whole story. Hopefully he will find his socket.
Making maple syrup is no walk in the park, either. Once you tap the trees and hang the bags, sit back and wait for the weather to make the sap flow. The maple trees like cold nights (sub freezing) and warm days. He has roughly 100 trees (85 or so were tapped based on the number of bags left over) scattered over about 6 acres. I should back up a bit. In the old days, you drilled a 5/16" hole in the tree, hammered in a metal spout and hung a pail on the tap. This has evolved to either plastic taps and plastic bags or hoses that go from tree to tree and the sap flows by gravity to a central collection point (yes, for really big production, they use vacuum systems to further automate the collection). @sirbike uses one season use plastic bags, they are cut along the top, and when the sap flows and it is time to collect the fluid we walk out into the woods w/ 5 gallon buckets and tip the bags to dump the sap into the bucket. Now, these are not groomed park like woods - they are rough, with downed branches, wet leaves, deep mud, and puddles. We haul the sap back to a trailer behind the tractor and dump it in...assuming no slips in said mud, leaf covered puddles, or stumbles and dropped pails. Today we collected about 90 gallons of sap. It gets hauled back to the sugar shack, is pumped into a 250 gallon holding tank and the evaporator is fired up. Last summer we cut wood, split it and stacked it for seasoning.
The sap is boiled to drive off water (40 gallons of sap makes 1 gallon of syrup). The wood fire under the stainless evaporator provides the heat to boil off the water. A blower provides the draft to keep the fire roaring. Now, one can either set the fire to just boil the sap, or you can run it hot, in which case the sap can foam and boil over. The trick is to get the fire burning hot enough to provide a roiling boil just shy of turbulence that causes the syrup to splash out of the evaporator or overflow. Of course, one setting of the variable speed blower doesn't do it because as the fire burns down it puts out less heat. This takes constant tweaking - adding more sap cools the boiling liquid, turning down the blower cuts back on heat, as does opening the firebox door to add wood.
When you make some maple syrup yourself the question inevitably arises...Why not just buy the stuff from Costco for $15 a quart? I'll let you answer this q for yourself. I think its all great fun! To put this in perspective, if we boil down 250 gallons of sap (weighing around a ton+) it will yield about 6 gallons of syrup.
And dreaming of that socket.....
Slightly more seriously, I went to @sirbike's farm to help make some maple syrup and saw his bike. Sorry, I couldn't resist the title of this thread. The overriding reason for this project was to replace all the brake lines with (omg, was that an unintended pun?) braided stainless steel lines. He is working with Galfer to come up with every single flexible section, and since they did not offer parts, sirbike had to remove and send them the entire brake system...yes, every single part, calipers, SMC, etc. In addition to the parts, he had to label each and every piece, he made a wooden mock-up and strapped all the pieces in place, and took pictures. When Galfer got the whole package, they were able to make engineering drawings for each flex hose and will be able to make pieces for anyone when this project is finished.
If you have questions, PM him and maybe he will post the whole story. Hopefully he will find his socket.
Making maple syrup is no walk in the park, either. Once you tap the trees and hang the bags, sit back and wait for the weather to make the sap flow. The maple trees like cold nights (sub freezing) and warm days. He has roughly 100 trees (85 or so were tapped based on the number of bags left over) scattered over about 6 acres. I should back up a bit. In the old days, you drilled a 5/16" hole in the tree, hammered in a metal spout and hung a pail on the tap. This has evolved to either plastic taps and plastic bags or hoses that go from tree to tree and the sap flows by gravity to a central collection point (yes, for really big production, they use vacuum systems to further automate the collection). @sirbike uses one season use plastic bags, they are cut along the top, and when the sap flows and it is time to collect the fluid we walk out into the woods w/ 5 gallon buckets and tip the bags to dump the sap into the bucket. Now, these are not groomed park like woods - they are rough, with downed branches, wet leaves, deep mud, and puddles. We haul the sap back to a trailer behind the tractor and dump it in...assuming no slips in said mud, leaf covered puddles, or stumbles and dropped pails. Today we collected about 90 gallons of sap. It gets hauled back to the sugar shack, is pumped into a 250 gallon holding tank and the evaporator is fired up. Last summer we cut wood, split it and stacked it for seasoning.
The sap is boiled to drive off water (40 gallons of sap makes 1 gallon of syrup). The wood fire under the stainless evaporator provides the heat to boil off the water. A blower provides the draft to keep the fire roaring. Now, one can either set the fire to just boil the sap, or you can run it hot, in which case the sap can foam and boil over. The trick is to get the fire burning hot enough to provide a roiling boil just shy of turbulence that causes the syrup to splash out of the evaporator or overflow. Of course, one setting of the variable speed blower doesn't do it because as the fire burns down it puts out less heat. This takes constant tweaking - adding more sap cools the boiling liquid, turning down the blower cuts back on heat, as does opening the firebox door to add wood.
When you make some maple syrup yourself the question inevitably arises...Why not just buy the stuff from Costco for $15 a quart? I'll let you answer this q for yourself. I think its all great fun! To put this in perspective, if we boil down 250 gallons of sap (weighing around a ton+) it will yield about 6 gallons of syrup.
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