After entering summer, the kiln factory has been shut down.
There have been heavy rains every three days, and the supply of firewood has been no longer available. In addition, the clay making has also been greatly affected.
The main reason is that there is insufficient demand and we cannot afford to support the kiln factory.
Except for a wave of transactions from several tribes after last year's Witch Lords Conference, there has been no sales of pottery to the outside world.
Together, there are several primitive tribes with a population of nearly a thousand people, and their wealth accumulation is almost zero.
The development of any business must be supported by demand and equal wealth in order to become active.
At the moment, the Ba family is the dominant one, monopolizing the two most valuable assets, pottery and linen, while the other tribes are so poor that they cannot come up with anything the Ba need to replace them.
He wanted copper ore, which the Uzbek tribe had, but there was no way to get it at the moment.
There is no trace of the urgently needed salt. Even if there is salt, the demand of only fifty people of the Ba ethnic group cannot be too large to support the scale of commercial transactions.
Plans to revitalize the nation through business have now reached a dead end.
Although there is definitely still demand from other tribes, this demand cannot satisfy the continuous operation of the kiln. Moreover, after firing for several months, the kiln has accumulated a lot of pottery. It is no longer a big deal to continue to waste manpower and fire more.
significance.
Therefore, after the witches and the others came to visit on Mother's Day, the kiln factory completely stopped production.
And after the midsummer of May, after Xu Chen finished making several jars of fruit wine, he no longer wanted to go out and be bothered.
The weather alternates between scorching sun and heavy rains, and the weather is erratic. The temperature during the day has climbed to at least around 40 degrees. It is completely impossible to exercise at a heavy load. The sweat is pouring down, and people feel like they are going to collapse.
After practicing for several days and relaxing, he began to feel bored again, so he decided to restart the kiln, but instead of firing pottery, he wanted to try copper smelting. He clicked on a new skill again and upgraded his identity to copper smelting.
Shi.
The emergence of metal smelting is a milestone in the evolution of human civilization.
If slash-and-burn cultivation marked the transition of mankind from the Paleolithic Age to the Neolithic Age, then the emergence of metal smelting technology, especially the emergence of bronzes, almost marked the complete departure of human civilization from the barbaric and primitive tribal and clan stage and entered the true royal civilization.
The period, and later generations specifically named it the Bronze Age, was the first time that human beings truly entered a period of civilization.
In China, the appearance of bronze wares roughly occurred from the late Xia Dynasty to the early Shang Dynasty.
This happened to be the early period of the dynasty, when the prototype of the country began to appear.
The rise of the Yanhuang tribe, expelling Chi You and occupying the Yellow River Basin, opened up the orthodox source of Chinese civilization. However, there was no written language at that time, and there were no records. All records about these wars were processed by later generations based on the language information passed down from generation to generation among the people.
The scale, time, size and even authenticity of the creation are all open to question.
Because the descriptions in these records are too general and inconsistent with the reality, they have a strong mythical flavor.
But the emergence of bronzes gave these historical researches a certain authority and foundation.
For example, foreigners do not recognize the existence of the Xia Dynasty in China, but the discovery of the Sanxingdui ruins can push the existence of Chinese civilization back to the end of the Neolithic period, around 3000 to 2000 BC.
Because the time period of this site is continuous, it exists in different areas and stages from stone sites to bronze sites, which can completely prove the transition of Chinese ancestors from the Neolithic Age to the Bronze Age.
Although Xu Chen can skillfully identify a large number of ore types, smelting metals is a separate process, and the metal smelting he knows is a large-scale system of high-tech equipment, and is divided into dry methods and wet methods.
, has nothing to do with this primitive earthen kiln.
More importantly, copper ore alone is of little use.
Metallic copper is very soft, and the higher the purity, the less useful it is. It must be smelted into bronze to increase its hardness and strength.
But bronze is an alloy, and two metals, lead and tin, need to be added, and the proportions must be appropriate.
But at the moment, he has not found the existence of these two important ores in the ores he exchanged and collected.
In other words, even if he smelted copper, he would never be able to produce bronze.
It’s just that you have to eat the food one bite at a time.
It took human civilization thousands of years to finally smelt bronze. He couldn't rush it now, so he could only slowly build up his family wealth one by one.
What's more, spanking a child on a rainy day is just idle time.
The weather has been hot and boring recently, and a group of people always need to do something to avoid looking like time-traveling waste.
At present, there is only one way to smelt copper, and that is the dry blast furnace.
Since the second big kiln was built, the first small experimental kiln has been rarely used. The volume is too small and it wastes firewood, which has become a bit useless.
The temperature of smelting copper is similar to that of firing pottery, but the process is much more complicated.
Pottery does not have a so-called melting point or strict molding temperature like metal. As long as the kiln temperature reaches a certain range, the clay will slowly enter the hardening and molding stage. In fact, it is formed by melting together elements such as silicon and iron in the clay.
The process of glazing, and glazing does not have a fixed melting point, and will have a huge fluctuation range depending on the elements it contains.
But smelting metal is completely different. If the required critical temperature cannot be reached, smelting will not be successful at all.
Moreover, during the smelting process, to ensure that the metallic copper melts and aggregates and is not mixed with the slag, there must be a method for removing the slag and a method for separating the copper.
These processes are far more complicated than throwing pottery into an earthen kiln and drying it over fire.
Therefore, the small earth kiln must be transformed into a small blast furnace that can be used to smelt metal.
This is a great test for Xu Chen.
However, he is a senior intellectual who has received higher education for more than ten years. Although he has nothing to do with metal smelting, he has never eaten pork and has seen pigs run away. The smelting of copper and iron, the two most widely used and oldest metals in mankind, is not the same.
It doesn't require any advanced technology, it just depends on your strength.
He believed that as long as the design of the blast furnace was more or less reasonable, and then it was burned with fire, it would be over.
It's simple and easy to use, but it's a bit expensive.
At the moment, firewood is the least valuable.
Although it is midsummer when vegetation is at its most prosperous, hundreds of trees were cut down to build houses last year, leaving a large number of branches at the foot of the mountain. After several months of exposure to the wind and sun, they have long since dried out and can be used as firewood.
.
As for the hard work of collecting firewood to burn the kiln, he naturally won't do it. The four kiln workers have also been idle recently, and they have obviously gained weight. They need to work like this to maintain their shape and strength, otherwise they will lose weight.
Being fat all over does not suit the aesthetic taste of savages.
You said it's hot, sorry, savages are not afraid of heat, they are only afraid of thunder.
After carefully studying the pottery board for two days, Xu Chen decided to get started.
First, let the kiln workers remove part of the small earthen kiln and redesign a new furnace.
Because there is no coal or carbon, and all heating is done by firewood, the blast furnace is designed with two layers, inside and outside.
The outer layer is a small earth kiln, and the inner layer is an inner tank about two feet in diameter built with fire bricks and clay, just like a crucible.
In order to obtain relatively clean copper, a slag outlet and an outlet for discharging copper juice must be designed.
Because it was the first time to design a traditional blast furnace, even if Xu Chen already had some rough ideas in mind, he would still face many practical difficulties in the actual production process. Therefore, under his guidance and leadership
, the four kiln workers made repeated modifications, and it took four days to finally complete the transformation of the earthen kiln.
After the blast furnace was repaired, the smoker was used for a day, and then the firewood and ore were prepared.
Although there is a lot of wood at the foot of the mountain, it still takes a lot of effort to get it back. It must be chopped into pieces of suitable size and carried back. This is the task of the four kiln workers.
Xu Chen himself took Gu Heju to clean out the several hundred kilograms of copper ore obtained from the Uzbek tribe, smashed it with stones and put it into the inner tank.
After all the ore is processed and put into the furnace, dry firewood is filled layer by layer between the inner tank and the outer furnace.
In order to ensure that the firewood can maintain burning and heating for a long time, the firewood put in should be as thick as possible, and in order to fully burn, the air passage should be exposed when stacked to ensure the supply of oxygen.
The most basic principle of blast furnace smelting, whether copper or iron, is the oxidation reaction at high temperature.
Oxygen is used to release elements such as sulfur and phosphorus in the ore through combustion, and the remainder is the metal component.
Therefore, ensuring adequate oxygen supply is the key to successful smelting.
The door of the earthen kiln was closed again, and hay was stuffed into the furnace to light it.
As the billowing smoke rose again in the kiln factory, Xu Chen finally let out a sigh of relief.
Success or failure all depends on luck.
Moreover, this was also a one-time deal. He used up all the copper ore at once. Although it weighed several hundred kilograms, in fact, it only filled one-third of the inner tank.
This kind of earthen blast furnace was almost made up by him, it was completely nonsense.
But he only has this method right now.
And he firmly believes that great efforts can produce miracles.
As long as the firepower is strong enough, nothing can be burned.