homemade maple sugar evaporator with pics

[markct]

i wanted to make a little maple sugar this coming spring but didnt need anything too big, just a touch bigger than the way we did it when i was a kid, a campstove and a pan, so i set out to make a small wood fired evaporator for next to nothing using stuff i had around, the body of it is a propane tank that i plasma cut so that i could open the top and bend the pieces up to get more height, and then made a door on the front and added a thimble of 6 inch well pipe to the back for the stovepipe. for the stainless pan i took the door off of an old restraunt type refrigerator and flattened out the sheet then laid it out and cut it with a the angle grinder and a zip wheel. i then clamped it down to a length of heavy channel iron and with a deadblow hammer worked back and forth and formed the bends, then welded the corners with my mig welder and stainless wire

 

[markct]

and here is one more view with the pan taken off. its not a big evaporator by any means but it was all outa free materials and definatly should be much more productive than the campstove method. the pan has a capacity of just under 12 gallons and has no baffles since i will just use it as a batch evaporator

 

[MrJimi]

LOL, do you ship to Florida?
Jim

 

[MikeD74T]

markct, To increase the firing capacity get a discarded oil burner and gut the electrodes, transformer, fire eye, oil lines, nozzle, etc., leaving just the housing & fan. Weld a tube onto the stove door to receive the blower. It'll better than double the boiling rate. Put in a cord switch to shut it off when adding wood. Adjust the shutter to best airflow. MikeD74T

 

[bjcsc]

Looks good. All you need now is to finish up the mash tank and condenser...

 

[markct]

mash tank and condenser????? never heard of these things in reference to maple sugaring, maybe i have just heard them as different terms could you explain more. im open to suggestions here! i still have to make the small preheater pan to feed the syrup into before its fed into the big pan as this is supposed to help with the efficiency i hear

 

[Erik_in_Hoyt]

he's not talking about using it to make sugar...
he's referring to a, um, fuel making setup - yeah, that's the ticket! fuel...

 

[SPIKER]

hehehe just need to add the sour mash heh

I made a similar pan last spring/winter, used SS sheet 48X44" 14ga to make the pan, bent 2 sides ~8" deep with a 1" back bend so ended up with 44" X 34" x 6" deep. works good over a wood fire with cinder blocks built 2 or 3 high. stacked bottom one or two on each side so air gets in fast, built blocks so pan is on top covering open area and has small edge of heat to escape up along the long sides ~1/2" or less on each side this way & has a 1" full port ball valve. I tilt the pan to empty it into 5 gal bucket through the pre-filters then finish the batch on camp stove on a 2nd home built SS pan. I built the smaller pan to fit on top of the 2 burner camp stove and I use foil to wrap around the stove legs and hold heat into the pan with the alum foil simply bent over the edge of the pan. I can get ~40 gallons into the big pan and ~5 gal into the small pan. i drain from small pan into pre-filter and then final clarifying filter and into jars where I re-eat it to boil on the stove in a double boiler and pull them out cap them and seal them only after cooling slightly. screw tops on snug and turn them upside down onto cool counter. I'm almost out from last years batches, (made about 3 gallons is all) and gave away some to guys how got me pan #1 and for the material I made pan #2 with my old boss. will give him some more this year probably. took maybe a rick of wood total and 4 or 5 days of sap harvesting... worst was getting the sap up top from the bottom land for bottling. thinking maybe I should build a new fire pit down near the trees this year and do main cooking down there and then only have to hall the mostly syrup up to the house.?

mark M

 

[Jerome]

Markct you may want to check out this forum.
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you know once you start making maple syrup you just can't stop.

 

[Erik_in_Hoyt]

the one year I made syrup, we just put the sap in a big roaster and let it simmer 24/7 adding more sap every day until it was thick enough and we were out of raw sap.

was tasty and made the house smell good, but not certain the final product was worth all the effort we spent keeping pet hair out of it...