Catastrophe at the ranch. Dad spent hours and hours (and $100) beefing up the angle-iron support on the evaporator top and then this happened on the first boil. When the metal cooled down after boiling about 100 gallons of sap, the dissimilar metals cooled at different rates (or something) and the metal warped terribly.
It seemed like a good idea to put huge angle iron on the under-side, but the bulk didn't make up for the simple pieces that Stan Miles helped dad bolt on top last year. Stan's Kansas farmboy ingenuity was much better than dad's overkill on metal size.
Now it's back to the drawing board - sap will be running next week and we have no evaporator. We'll probably have to just buy the metal and re-weld something. At least experience is a good teacher and some day we'll be able to warn others not to do what dad did...
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