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He'd drive out to the trees in his old Blazer. We'd empty the pails into three old milk pails he kept in the back of the Blazer. They would be heavy after emptying all the pails. Get back to his house, and he had welded together a large (3' x 5') pan that was maybe 6 inches deep. He kept a fire going under this pan the whole season long, and we would just keep adding the new sap to the sap that had been boiling down. The season was a couple weeks long, so he had a big pile of firewood next to that pan that would slowly dwindle.
Once the pan had boiled away like 80% of the water that was in the sap he had collected, he'd pour the sap out of the pan and into a big cast iron pot. This he'd keep on the fire for a while too. Eventually, he would bring the thicker syrup inside into the kitchen. It would be filtered through a big felt cone, and heated up on the stove in a regular pot. Once a candy thermometer said it was the right temperature, he'd pour it into the sterilized mason jars to seal it up.
I forget what the ratio is. Something like 20 gallons of sap boil down into one gallon of syrup. He's end up with a few shelves of his pantry full of maple syrup. This would be passed around to friends, family, and as a gift for hosts when he would visit someone. He also used a lot of it himself.
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