Barrel stove kit installed - syrup season here I come

Every year I gobble up a few tanks of propane making syrup from the maples on my property.  Because I have mostly red and swamp maple, whose sugar content is in the .5-1.5 percent range, I have to boil a lot of sap.

Side note: I've planted sugar maple saplings that I bought from the Arbor Day people, but that's 8-10 years out.

Given the massive amounts of wood, brush, and a stand of girdled trees that I've slowly been harvesting, I have "free" fuel.   Boiling my own sap with my own wood as fuel using recycled parts gives me "free" maple syrup, manages brush on my property, is carbon-neutral, and is a great hobby.

I purchased the Vogelzang barrel stove kit from Northern Tool, and today took advantage of the 40 degree (F) weather and installed it.   Total time about 2 hours, and I only cut myself on the sharp metal once.   The kit has the cast iron feet, front door and an adapter/damper for a 6" pipe.
Tools you will need:
Drill with a small and a 5/16" bit
Jigsaw/Sawzall with a metal cutting blade (or 2)
Magic marker for marking your cuts
Beefy phillips-head screwdriver
Cleverness at filling in the blanks on the instructions

Total cost: free barrel (but look on Craigslist, $25-40 is the norm), $51 for kit incl. shipping, 2 bags of play sand and 2 lengths of 6" pipe, total $80.

Instructions were good, not even chinglish, but left many small details out.   If you've built things and are handy this is not a problem.   If you are looking for IKEA-like detail, seek help or look elsewhere.

Ear plugs are a must.   One thing I found is that unless you punch all the holes first, they'll have a tendency to 'walk' while you're drilling, and nothing will line up.   What I did was get the parts on with 2 or 3 screws, then used the holes in the Vogelzang castings to line up the drill - everything went together perfectly.

Once assembled, I put a few inches of sand in the bottom and lit it up.   Worked like a charm, exactly as I had imagined it would.   At one point the surface temperature was 800 degrees (F).   It had a pretty funky paint smell for a bit.  I let it burn down, I'll scrape the charred paint off later, and maybe hit it with a can of stove paint.  Next step will be to attach a shelf to hold the pan of sap (stainless steel steam-table tray).   I can taste the syrup now.

Front attached:

Feet attached:

Chimney adapter attached

First firing (note the smoking paint)

Nice and warm!

Looking to improve your hiking performance? Drop some weight

Gear
Most people, even active people, could stand to lose a few pounds.   While there's a lot of time spent on gearmongering and swapping steel for titanium, let's look at what weighs what.  "A pound on the foot is like 5 on the back" they say.   What about "a pound off the belly is a pound off the back?"

Looking at my pack weight thread here and my Google docs spreadsheet for my base weight is just under 15 lbs.

Personally, I could lose 10 lbs.   That means I could add 10 lbs of food and water to my base weight, and do an overnight with essentially an empty pack.   That's huge!

Also, generally the process of losing weight is going to build up your strength, which means more miles, and more, BETTER miles.   You don't want to drag ass into camp at dusk, miserable and winded.   A light pack and fit legs are the best way to do this.  Spare energy and a good attitude go a long way towards making it easy to Leave No Trace.   You won't be tempted to take shortcuts, leave microtrash or food crumbs, if you've still got something left in the tank at the end of the day.

Water
I generally start off with a 70oz Platypus and whats left of breakfast in a Nalgene.   Combined that's about 5lbs of water.   Want to carry that for free?  Lose 5lbs - it's really not that hard.

This winter and spring the focus will be dropping weight, for higher performing summer hiking.