• Foreword by Michael Farrell
• Introduction
• Planning Ahead
• Trees Taps and Saps
  • Selecting Your Trees
  • When How and Where to Tap
  • Buckets and Pails
  • Dealing with Frozen Sap
  • Sap Storage
• Homemade Evaporators
  • Engineering Principles of Backyard Evaporators
  • Evaporator Pans
  • Building a Homemade Evaporator
  • Cement Block Evaporators
  • Basic Block Sugarin' Rig
  • Basic Block With Stack and Damper Controls
  • High Capacity Block Rig with Multiple Pans
  • Semi-pro Cement Block Rig
  • Steel Drum and Tank Evaporators
  • 25 Gallon Drum Evaporators in Stone Wall
  • 50 Gallon Drum Evaporator, Wood Fired
  • 50 Gallon Drum Evaporator, Oil Fired
  • Converted Oil Storage Tank, Oil Fired
  • Double Pan Converted Water Pressure
    Tank Evaporator
  • Backyard Barbecue Conversion
  • Congressman's Box Stove Conversion
• The Boiling Down Process
  • Step by Step on the Author's Rig
  • Canning and Storage
  • Making Maple Sugar (For Those Who Dare)
• Anonymous Revelations From Backyarders
• Musings of a Backyard Sugarer
• Index

Excerpt from Homemade Evaporators page 31

Building a Homemade Backyard Evaporator
Making your own backyard evaporator is a process of sizing up what materials you have lying around your place, what you can scrounge up elsewhere, and putting together something that will get a lot of hot flames against the bottom of your evaporator pan or pans with a reasonably efficient use of firewood and with some degree of fire control.

If you're related to a building supply dealer, maybe you can get him to give you some "irregular" cement blocks to build your evaporator out of, or a local plumber might have some discarded water pressure tanks out behind his shop. With an emery blade on your electric saw or a cutting torch, you can make a very professional acting (if not looking) evaporator. Then too, a heating contractor might have an old oil storage tank he'll let you have, which would make up into a nice fire box, and some rusty old stove pipe, which might be just the ticket for your smokestack.