Hauling Maple Sap

With warmer temperatures in the forecast, the maple trees should soon start filling buckets with their sap. I am certainly hopeful  that happens so I thought I should prepare a bit for those gallons and gallons of sap. Many of the trees we tap are not close to any trail we can use to haul the sap on with mechanical means. Once some of the snow melts we might be able to use Ann's pony to haul some of it but there will still be areas where it has to be carried by hand. Five gallons of sap weights about 40 pounds. After a few dozen trips your arms begin to complain. All this lead to my recent project as pictured here, a carrying yoke. I tried it out here with six gallon buckets full of water so I had roughly 100 pounds on. I need to shorten the ropes so that I can grasp the bucket handle and thus divide the load between my shoulders and my arms.

I started out by splitting a aspen log in half with the chain saw. As you will see in the following pictures, I did almost all the cutting and carving with a chainsaw. Chisels, rasps, and knives were used to smooth every thing out. I did not want to spend a lot of time on this so some of the work was left a bit crude.If this turns out to be something I use a lot I will finish it off a little nicer! Some of the felt I made last week found a home as padding  on this.

I determined the overall length by holding a bucket in each hand and then measuring the distance between their centers. To that I add a couple inches for insurance, I can always make it smaller, adding  back on is tricky. At the center line I cut out a semi-circle big enough to fit  comfortably around my neck. You have to start with a log large enough to leave a decent bit of wood behind the neck hole, this one was about 8 inches in diameter.

 

I next carved and whittled off every bit of extra wood that I could. Less wood, less weight. The carrying shafts on each end need to be at the center of the shoulder so that the load will pull straight down rather than twisting the yoke. I tried to shape the inside surface to fit uniformly across my shoulders so that the load will be spread evenly. After I had it fitting as well as I could I added a thick layer of felt as padding. I used material from a old tee shirt to cover and hold the felt in place.

The fabric is stretchy so that made it fairly easy to get all the wrinkles out. I used staples to attach it. If we have a good year I could easily have 700-800 gallons of sap to get in. A lot of that will need to be carried by hand so this should make that task a little easier. Since some of those trees are over 300 yards from the sap cooker every little bit helps.