My next door neighbor has a blower on his evaporator. I can tell you that you will get a TON of sparks coming out of your stack. The blower sure does speed up the boiling process though. We are going to have to gather tomorrow afternoon. We have some trees that haven't dripped at all, but we had some that have anywhere from a quarter of a bucket to 3/4 full tonight. Mid forties today and probably tomorrow, too. I have three young trees about 14-15 inches in diameter at the edge of a pasture that drip much better than average. They are from half to 3/4 full. If they drip tomorrow and we don't gather until late afternoon I'll have to change buckets on them or lose sap. If I had 500 trees like those three--------------------

Supposed to get down into single digit temps Sat and Sunday so we have to empty the buckets. Starting about Tuesday it is supposed to be mid-forties daytime and mid-twenty's at night. Should get things going. I expect you'll get the same type weather a day or two after us. 

Another of my neighbors has a 10 acre woodlot bordering me that is set up with pipeline on a vacum pump. They simply reverse the pump fittings to backwash the whole system at seasons end. That's getting too high end for me. We have a fairly large number of owners of boling sheds who own no trees themsleves. They buy all of their sap from guys like me who have a small number of taps and we don't have evapoators. Seems to be all kinds of arrangements for payment. by the tap, by the gallons of sap, or by finished syrup. For the imediate future this arrangement will work for us. Gives us enough syrup for the family and a few bucks extra without the investment of the evaporator. 

Ed Cristenson e-mailed me yesterday. He's well on the way to filling my order of parts for the OC-4. This crawler project is going to run a couple of thousand more than I'd hoped, but in the end I'll have a fully reconditioned tractor that should last me as long as I live. Going to need it, too. Are going to open up several new woods roads and need the OC-4 to get rid of the rocks and improve the roads to the point we are not beating everything up traveling over them. Muy son just bought a 1900 Int. Loadstar dump truck and I have an old Dodge 500 dump truck that I am going to build a dump trailer out of so we should be able to get gravel about anywhere we need to, eventually. I am turning out to be busier in my retirement than I was when i was working! We have a barn we have to get back up to snuff this summer so my son can start milking cows, too. the farmer he works for is getting ready to retire and Jeff plans to buy his cows, but he doesn't want to farm it on Tug Hill. Turn 62 next month. I'm liking this retiremnt already. Working for myself and the kids sure beats bustin yer butt for someone else. <!-- s:wink: --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_wink.gif" alt=":wink:" title="Wink" /><!-- s:wink: -->