Running main lines, we’re committed now

Well it has been a long time since I have posted something on the site.  I am back up north for the weekend and Mike and I have a lofty goal of running all the mainline in the large part of the bush. This is about 350 taps and from now on it will called section 1.

I had the misfortune of cutting open my finger after buying a new Remington knife. Beware, I’ll post the picture when I am not on devil Dial-up. It flipped open on the car ride from the Sault less than 20 minutes after I bought it. Not a great start but I am sure it will get better.

The first stop we made on the island was Keith Brown’s. We picked up the wire spooler and the mainline wire. He was nice enough to let us borrow a gripple tool, this was an amazing and time saving device. It helped us get all the wire up in less than two days.

We then had Bill Smith take a walk through the our bush. He took a look at our layout and our plans and said it looked good to him. He did however have some real concerns about our evaporator.  We have two really great stainless steel flat pans but there is no way that we will be able to keep up with 500 taps on a 2x 6 pan. We might have to pull back the number of taps we put in this year. It is either that or come up with $4500 for a new flue pan. We are keeping our eyes open for quality used stuff.

We have also made some major modifications to the sugar shack. We replace the rough log roof supports with regular 2×6. This allows us to cut off all the huge logs that run the width of the sugar shack.

Tomorrow we will do some more finishing touches to the sugar shack and put up the main line.  We really wanted to get blue line run in the bush but it was not possible to get it here on time, we had to settle for the black stuff that was in stock. There is nothing wrong with the product it just takes a bit more effort to clean.

That’s all, will post tomorrow.