The new glass manufacturing factory was chosen by Xu Wei to be located in a saline-alkali wasteland near the seaside in Bohai County and Zhangwu County. After all, after the glass factory is established, a large amount of pollutants will be released, and it will also affect the output of surrounding farmland. The production impact here in the saline-alkali land is slightly less. , and glass is a fragile item. Compared with road transportation, sea transportation is safer.
After choosing the factory site, Zhang Baiqi found some masons and spent 10 days building a giant factory building with a brick and wood structure! It was about the size of a basketball court.
Finally, there is the internal setting of the factory building, including the construction of sintering furnaces, smelting furnaces, and annealing furnaces. Daqian’s people have a lot of experience in building blast furnaces, and there is not much difference between the blast furnaces of fired glass and steel plants. Even technically speaking, the steel blast furnaces The technology is even higher. After all, the melting temperature of glass is less than 600 degrees, while the melting temperature of steel is over 1,300 degrees. The blast furnace for making glass doesn't even need refractory bricks.
The construction of the factory building is not so fast, but the preliminary experiments of making glass can be started very quickly. First build a small blast furnace and dry boiler, and then you can start making glass after finding the raw materials.
Making glass is not difficult. First, pour quartz sand and melt it. Of course, if it is not available, it is the same as using sand from the seaside. If the glass factory is built on the seaside, it is also very convenient to obtain raw materials to a certain extent.
Of course, compared to sand, quartz sand is a better raw material for glass. Once you have the raw materials, add limestone to help melt it, and plant ash to clarify the glass. Soon a green glass liquid will appear.
The molten glass liquid was poured into a special square basin. After the glass cooled, a square piece of glass appeared. In addition to this, Xu Wei also pulled out a glass rod. After the glass rod cooled, he used The grinder polished it into the shape of glass balls. These glass beads were basically larger than the marbles Xu Ruoyun played with when she was a child, and were about the same size as pigeon eggs.
These two glass shapes are the products that glass factories will manufacture in the future.
In this era, there was no paper for windows. Rich people used gauze, while poor people only had wooden boards. The light could only be seen through the skylights on the roof. There were basically no windows made of glass. But in Xu Wei's world, glass windows It is the main use of glass, and it is also the main use of glass factories. 20 million people use glass windows, which is a tens of billions market!
Glass balls are considered a fast-selling product, and glass balls are also considered gems in this era. As long as they keep the news secret and put these glass balls on the market in several states in Han Dynasty at the same time, they should be able to make a small profit. There are probably a few of them. Make small goals!
Although this was nothing to Da Qian, Xu Wei thought it was good if he could deceive the powerful nobles.
Zhang Baiqi, who followed Xu Weilai, stared at all this with his mouth open. In this era, glass was also a kind of gemstone, and the price was extremely high, several times higher than the weight of gold.
He simply couldn't imagine that gems could be mass-produced from a blast furnace. What kind of glass factory was this? It was simply a factory that could produce gold.
After reacting, he smiled in surprise and said: "We have made a fortune in power. If we sell these glasses to the powerful nobles of the Han Dynasty, we can make billions of dollars with just tens of thousands of them. We have the technology to make gems. This Don't say 3 billion a year for the glass factory, even 30 billion won't be a problem!
But Xu Wei broke Zhang Baiqi's fantasy and said: "Things are rare and valuable. If you get dozens or hundreds of glass balls, you may be able to sell them for hundreds of thousands each. If you get dozens or more,
A million pieces, this glass ball will immediately become the same as the stones on the roadside, no one will look at it, and it will no longer be possible to become a kind of gemstone."
"So you can only make some quick money with this idea. The nobles are not stupid. As long as they sell a few thousand pieces, they will notice the problem and know that the glass is actually worthless!"
This kind of thing often happens in modern times. Aluminum was originally more expensive than gold, but as soon as electrolytic aluminum appeared, the price of aluminum plummeted and it became a common building material. The same goes for diamonds. After technology developed, a large number of diamonds
Mine appears, logically this thing should return to its original value.
But in order to defraud money, gem dealers actually come up with diamonds, one item with two names, and the prices are very different. But even with this kind of scam, many people still fall for it every year.
Xu Wei continued: "If you really want to make money in the glass industry, you still have to find a way to sell it at a low price so that tens of millions of people can afford glass. This is the real road to wealth. You can imagine what it would be like if
People all over the world use glass for their windows. What a huge market this is. Glass can also be used to make houses, drinking glasses, various decorations, and small toys. It can be said that as long as you want to get as many industries as you want, the glass market is
How big!"
After hearing this, Zhang Baiqi also began to think about where this glass could be used. Since the government said that the market for glass is worth tens of billions, it must not be wrong!
Xu Wei continued: "This small laboratory will continue to produce glass balls during this period. You arrange a dozen caravans and ask them to take these glass balls to the major cities in Han Dynasty and start selling them in December.
These glass beads can earn back the money of the glass factory!"
Zhang Baiqi laughed and said: "Using a big man's money to help us build a glass factory, I feel happy just thinking about it!"
Then Zhang Baiqi went to prepare for this matter.
One month later!
The glass factory was completed, and the first batch of 200 apprentices also underwent simple training. The technicians of the glass factory were those who followed Xu Wei in conducting experiments. After all, they were the only ones in the world who had experience in making glass except for Xu Wei, and even
They have more experience than Xu Wei. Under Xu Wei's command, they can already skillfully produce various animal graphics, which Xu Wei cannot do.
In this way, the construction of a clay workshop-style glass factory was completed. The glass factory also started firing glass for the first time!
The huge sintering furnace emits dizzying heat, and raw materials are continuously poured into the blast furnace by apprentices.
The scorching temperature made the apprentices in the workshop covered in sweat. Many people's faces exploded with a layer of dead skin due to long-term exposure to this high temperature environment and no protection, and their eyes were all burned red by the fire.
After feeding in the materials, an apprentice immediately pulled the bellows to melt the raw materials, and continued to pour in the limestone combustion accelerant. The red glass solution quickly appeared.
But if you want to make glass that is not green, you just need to add some strong oxidants to change the valence state of the divalent iron. This requires the use of potassium nitrate made from plant ash, so that the color of the glass produced will be transparent.
If you want to make glass without bubbles, you need to add some salt and use a porcelain rod to stir the glass liquid so that there will be no bubbles.
After everything is done, take out the crucible in the furnace, then go to a square porcelain basin, spread the glass solution over the porcelain basin like a pancake, take out the glass and it will become a square glass plate. Then it enters the annealing furnace to reduce the stress on the glass, so that a qualified piece of glass is produced.
After the first piece of glass appears, the flow of work begins. When these workers gain experience, various glass products will appear in Daqian's market.