Xu Huai and Liu Qiong'er, accompanied by Su Laochang, Cheng Yi, Zhuang Shouxin, Shen Lian and others, were riding horses and saw several black smoke billowing from the mouth of the chimney that was more than two feet high. out.
Tang's iron yard in Shibaliwu was one of the few large iron yards in Tongbai Mountain in the early years. After all, at that time, there were tens of thousands of people in Tongbai Mountain, and they could produce 50,000 to 60,000 kilograms of iron a year, which was enough.
Which ordinary person doesn't sharpen a kitchen knife to the thickness of two fingers and then continue to use it?
And today's Shibaliwu Iron Field, as one of the two most important iron smelting bases in Chushan, can produce as much as Jingbei Road in one year.
The Shibaliwu Iron Works directly employs more than a thousand craftsmen, which does not seem very large. But when you include the craftsmen in the iron coal mine and the coal burning yard, as well as the laborers responsible for material transportation, there are six to seven thousand people. .
Chushan built a living area for the craftsmen and their families in the valley between Shibaliwu Iron Station and Huaidu Town. The population density is no longer lower than that of the original Huaiyuan Town.
Chushan also strongly encouraged craftsmen to move to Huaidu Town and rely on the fine iron from the iron yard to make plows, shovels, shovels, knives and other iron tools. Some of them were purchased by the industry, and some were sold to prefectures and counties.
Although the time is still short, Huaidu Town has also gathered hundreds of blacksmith shops, large and small, specializing in iron forging. Last year, Huaidu Town alone was able to consume more than 20 kilograms of iron produced by the Shibaliwu Iron Works. iron.
In addition to military armor, the iron tools made in Chushan are gradually becoming famous in Jinghu and other places.
After being able to mass-produce fine iron materials, Chushan Ironware has become synonymous with high quality and low price.
Nowadays, merchants from Jinghu and even Huainan and other places come here because of its reputation.
Especially in summer and autumn, small boats can directly reach Huaidu Town. Merchants from all over Huainan gather in Huaiyuan, Huaidu and other places to buy fine ironware forged in Chushan, and then hire ships to transport it to various places in Huainan for sale.
To a certain extent, Emperor Jianji transferred Wang Boqian and other generals from the Huai royal family to Jianye to hold important positions, and worked hard to integrate Huainan's military and political affairs under the unified control of the imperial court. This also helped the bulk goods produced in Chushan be transported to Huainan for sale through the Huai River. sale.
Otherwise, given the relationship between Chushan and Prince Huai's Mansion, Huainan could set up any threshold to block Chushan's goods.
Of course, the premise of all this is that Huainan can resist the southward invasion of the Japanese soldiers.
After the great victory of Ruying, Chushan focused on building the Shuishui defense line for most of the year, and a large number of manpower and material resources were directed toward the coast of the Shuishui River. Fifteen or six thousand prisoners of war were captured at the Ruying Battle, and they were all imprisoned in Zhaoling to build the city. The more than 20,000 young and strong civilians captured in the embankment were resettled in Suiping and Queshan counties, where the county governance was newly restored, where they built villages and cultivated the abandoned grain fields.
Therefore, in the iron yards in Huaiyuan, Xinyang and other places, after the victory of Ruying, a large number of young men quit the army, the labor force became abundant, and the output in the first half of this year reached the scheduled two million kilograms.
This was unimaginable before Chushan Camp was established.
Shen Lian is in charge of the Coal and Iron Supervision, and in the past two years he has made further improvements to the "one-step method with continuous furnaces" created by Xu Huai himself and the craftsmen.
The original continuous furnace method was to stack the smoldering and agglomerated cooked coal with impurities removed at the bottom of the furnace of a bottle-shaped blast furnace. The iron ore was placed on top of the cooked coal for refining. The molten iron flowed into the side furnace through the bottom channel and was stirred and cooled. .
Since the bottle-shaped blast furnace still has a traditional cupola shaft furnace structure, and the side furnace hearth needs to be lower than the base of the bottle-shaped furnace, so that molten iron can flow in through the channel. Shen Lian found that in addition to the fact that the flame flow from the bottle-shaped blast furnace into the side furnace was not strong enough, The molten iron cools too quickly,
The quality of the refined iron produced is not as surprising as the structure of the furnace is too complex.
The continuous furnace method requires refilling each furnace of molten iron, which is also very cumbersome.
Shen Lian has been studying the continuous furnace method for a long time, and noticed that the most critical thing about the continuous furnace method is to introduce the flame flow of the main furnace into the side furnace.
After many attempts, Shen Lian redesigned the furnace structure. First, he changed the cupola shaft furnace structure of the main furnace to a closed round furnace and moved the flue to the side furnace.
In this way, the air inlet of the water blast is in the main furnace, and the flue is in the side furnace. By exhausting the smoke through the blast, the flame flow can be forcibly extracted from the main furnace to the side furnace, which actually burns the fuel with the iron ore. Stone smelting is separated, which greatly simplifies the feeding procedure.
Shen Lian also discovered that the new furnace can directly smelt refined iron with crude iron materials, which is more effective than smelting iron ore. Even if the blast is strong enough, it can directly smelt soft iron that traditionally requires thousands of hammers to be made.
The new furnace was still in the experimental stage, and the previous continuous furnace method was created by Xu Huai. Shen Lian did not rush to report it to the Changshiyuan or Xu Huai before he was sure enough.
Although Xu Huai did not mean to blame this time, Shen Lian realized that he had neglected the iron wire and wanted to make up for it. At the same time, he thought that the new furnace would be more convenient for drawing iron wire, so he designed the new furnace in Huaiyuan. Offer.
Xu Huai was not clear about many technical details, and he did not have that much energy to focus on elaborating on the technical details. However, he always encouraged craftsmen not to stick to established methods, but to try new methods as much as possible, and to find ways to deal with them. Continuous efforts are made to improve existing work.
If it weren't for Xu Huai's encouragement, after Xu Huai invented the continuous furnace method, which increased the efficiency of smelting refined iron several times, Shen Lian didn't fully master the continuous furnace method, and would have dared to spend tens of thousands of money and food on other refining methods. Zhuang Shouxin was the first to hit his head with a cane.
Among the thousands of craftsmen in Bianliang, the disciples recruited by great craftsmen such as Yu Chengzhen and Zhuang Shouxin can be said to be only one in a hundred or one in a thousand. Even those who are a little dull in terms of qualifications will not fall into their eyes.
However, Zhuang Yong, Chen Rongjun and others are more rigidly adherent to established methods, have excellent mastery of craftsmanship passed down for thousands of years, and are capable of leading a team of craftsmen, but Shen Lian is the most eclectic.
Xu Huai initially selected Shen Lian to study the continuous furnace method, and then appointed him to take charge of the Shibaliwu Iron Yard. The subsequent new iron yard in Xinyang was affiliated to the Shibaliwu Iron Yard, and Shen Lian arranged the manpower to build it. Management; the newly established Coal and Railway Supervision Office is also located at Shibaliwu Railway Station, not Chushan or Wuyang.
Hearing that Shen Lian had designed and built a new furnace in Shibaliwu, Xu Huai didn't care about the effect. He was more concerned about Shen Lian's research on wind power, flame flow and furnace structure.
Only by doing this can Shen Lian truly enter a level and realm that no other craftsman in the world can reach.
Of course, Zhuang Shouxin still had some complaints about his son-in-law Shen Lian's troubles.
In order to show substantial support, Xu Huai personally led everyone to the iron yard early in the morning to see the actual operation effect of the new furnace.
"The molten iron is put into the side furnace and stirred with wooden rods, and the solidification will be slow; stirring with iron rods will solidify faster; and if the molten iron stirred with wooden rods is introduced into a cold chamber to speed up the cooling, the resulting iron will be hard and brittle, and the iron quality will be faster. Better than crude iron, but similar in properties,"
Walking to the scorching chamber, Shen Lian introduced his research on the continuous furnace method in the past two years and said,
"I secretly speculated that everything in the world has its own quality. Different qualities lead to different properties. All qualities are fused and separated, and the good and the bad are mixed together in a furnace. It seems that there is no difference between a wooden rod and an iron rod, but the former is additional
Incorporate wood into molten iron. When crude iron is smelted, stone is placed on charcoal, and the melt flows down. The quality is hard and brittle. Wood should be incorporated during this process, so the properties are similar. From this, it can be seen that charcoal should also contain wood. , burning it with the charcoal-making method actually removes harmful substances while retaining its true nature..."
"Don't think, let alone think privately. First, you have ideas, observations, speculations, and find ways to create suitable conditions for verification; second, if you want to write these writings, you can first communicate them internally and cross-fertilize them. verify,"
Xu Huai circled a circle with his hands, showed it to Shen Lian, and said,
"The known world is only so big, and everything else is unknown and needs to be explored by generations of people. Anyone who can do something about this can be said to be a cornerstone figure and is destined to go down in history. Leave your name..."
"Commander Jie's instructions are absolutely correct!" Shen Lian said.
Xu Huai took off his robes and armor and wore only a short coat. He led everyone to listen to Shen Lian's explanation while carefully observing the details of the furnace worker's operation of the new furnace.
At night, he took everyone to live in the iron yard and convened the craftsmen to discuss the gains and losses of the iron yard's operation in the past two years. Early the next morning, when the temperature of the new furnace had completely cooled down, Xu Huai personally got into the furnace to study the internal structure. And the changes in furnace materials after experiencing high temperature burning.
Although the sinking furnace has carefully drawn the structure of the furnace, and the changes in the furnace materials after burning can also be sampled and observed, Xu Huaining made himself black and dirty, as if he had emerged from a pile of charcoal. We also want to set an example and warn all work officers not to be separated from the hard work on the front line just because they have official positions.
Sometimes bureaucracy is unavoidable, but it must not occur at this time.
After confirming that the new furnace directly uses pig iron for smelting, which is more convenient for batch refining of iron products, Xu Huai directly lived in the iron yard and personally participated in the trial production of iron wire.
At that time, the world had the ability to manufacture complex instruments driven by water power, such as water-borne ceremonial platforms, and it also compiled and handed down writings on machinery such as "New Instruments and Symbols", but it did not really develop.
The drawing of iron wire has extremely high requirements on furnace flame flow, which is the key reason why most craftsmen in the world cannot imitate it.
The continuous furnace method pioneered by Xu Huai and the new improved furnace designed and improved by Shen Lian can directly refine the most difficult-to-melt soft iron by improving the blast conditions, thus providing the most basic and solid conditions for wire drawing. .
However, if you want to make wire drawing cheap enough, you have to rely entirely on craftsmen to use iron pliers to pull the semi-melted wire out bit by bit through the drawing hole. This is obviously not possible. You need to design a winch driven by animal power or water power. Equipment and put it into wire drawing.
In addition, Chushan has begun to take shape in the ability to smelt iron on a large scale, and iron tools can no longer be limited to the production of traditional farm tools, knives and other iron tools.
Otherwise, due to demand constraints, it will be difficult for iron smelting to achieve real development.
The new furnace designed by Shen Lian actually provides convenient conditions for the batch preparation of more types of iron products. Xu Huai thought that before the iron wire preparation process matures, angle iron with a simpler preparation process can be produced first.
The angle iron, which is fully kneaded in the Julien furnace and pressed into a mold, can be easily drilled and riveted and used in the preparation of various structural parts. Compared with wood, it has higher structural strength but is lighter.
