Although the entire Gonghuo Tribe is busy and noisy every day, with people from each tribe coming and going, performing their duties and working hard, and there are endless gossips and some favorite stories happening every day, but what really makes everyone care
Yes, it is undoubtedly Xu Chen’s every move.
No matter where he is or what he is doing, as soon as he appears, a large group of people will definitely surround him, and those who are busy at work will always stop their work and cheer enthusiastically.
Xu Chen is also an extremely friendly leader. No matter where he appears, he can have a lively chat with anyone from any tribe. Especially when some tribes encounter some problems, he will carefully help arrange and solve them.
Over the past few years, the prestige and popularity he has accumulated can no longer be surpassed or replaced by anyone.
In recent days, the rammed earth wall-building method that Xu Chen had invented made everyone excited.
This method is simple, novel and very convenient. You only need to use local materials to fill the wooden frame with soil, and use a copper pestle to pound it tightly to create a section of wall. It is far stronger than adobe bricks and is also simpler.
Therefore, many tribes that are laying out a large number of bricks are beginning to make plans to use rammed earth to build houses.
However, Xu Chen said that this method is not yet mature and needs continuous testing.
Two- and three-story earthen walls are simple, but five- and six-story walls are prone to problems.
Rammed earth walls are not steps, but have the same thickness from bottom to top, so the requirements for horizontality and verticality are very high.
Even if the mud brick wall is slightly skewed, as long as the pulling force is distributed evenly throughout, it will generally not collapse.
But rammed earth walls are different. Each layer must be rammed to the strongest level. Some layers cannot be loose and some are tight, otherwise the force will be uneven.
Another section of the wall is made of thousands of kilograms of earth. Once the wall is misaligned, problems will occur. The more layers there are and the higher the earth wall is, the greater the chance of problems.
It was the first time for a group of savages to come into contact with rammed earth walls and they had no experience whatsoever.
And Xu Chen himself was a semi-smart person who only understood theory but not manufacturing, and his hands-on ability was extremely poor. Therefore, after several days of experiments, he built a four-story earth wall more than 20 meters long around the trading market, and it really started.
Something went wrong, and the fifth floor collapsed shortly after it was built, almost burying several men working on it.
Faced with such a horrific collapse scene, all the tribes who wanted to build houses with rammed earth backed down and began to feel nervous and frightened.
Xu Chen also had a headache, so he could only calm down and encourage a group of craftsmen to continue experimenting.
From the analysis of the collapse site, there should not be much problem with the soil quality. The main reason is that there was negligence during the molding and ramming of the soil.
There is another more important problem, which may be because the temperature is too low in winter and the earthen walls dry slowly.
Therefore, after summing up his experience, Xu Chen expanded the rammed earth area and built a nearly fifty-meter-long rammed earth wall along the trading market. After completing the circle, the front wall was basically dry, and then he continued to build it upwards.
Second floor.
In order to ensure the quality of the rammed earth, he required that there should be no large stones and debris in the earth, and the earth in the mold must be rammed firmly enough.
After changing the construction methods and strengthening supervision and management, the situation is much better this time. It took half a month to build a six-story rammed earth wall around the trading market, with each floor about three meters high.
Ten centimeters, the total height is about the same as an adult.
Looking at this tall and magnificent walled building, all the tribes were amazed and excited every day.
After finishing the final section of the earth wall and observing for two consecutive days without any problems, Xu Chen finally let out a long breath.
This height is almost enough for ordinary houses, and two floors at most will definitely be enough.
You must know that the overall height of the adobe houses of the Ba people is about three meters, but the eaves and walls are less than two meters. The door height is only about 1.78 meters. Adults have to bow their heads and bend down to enter. The tallest people in the room can reach out and reach out.
It can grab the thatch on the roof, and the room is very narrow, only ten square meters in size.
Many other tribes have rooms that are even lower and narrower.
There were even worse houses that in Xu Chen's eyes looked like nothing more than adobe shacks.
But no matter how bad these houses are, compared to the caves where people lived together in the past, the environment is much better. After all, two or three people living in a room not only have better privacy, but also have more space to sleep in. Compared with dozens of people living in caves,
It's much more comfortable for hundreds of people, men, women and children, to squeeze together.
Rammed earth houses are sturdier than adobe bricks and stones, and are more resistant to extrusion and lodging. They are not only simple and convenient to build, but can also greatly expand the area of the house.
If you were to build such a long and high section of wall with mud bricks, you would have to prepare two or three months in advance just to lay out the mud bricks, but now it only took half a month from beginning to end, and this was still in Xu Chen's half-baked intelligent human experiment.
Under the command of nature, it was completed by a group of primitive barbarians who had never been exposed to rammed earth construction.
If a group of skilled workers are proficient in ramming earth, the fifty-meter wall can definitely be completed in a week at most. If it is divided into several groups and constructed at the same time, it may be completed in two or three days, and there is no need to wait for the earth wall to dry.
One floor is built directly upward.
But even in such an unfamiliar and inexperienced situation, the construction speed is shocking enough.
Even Xu Chen was a little surprised by the progress of the entire project.
Of course, the reason for the high speed is that he used enough people.
For this fifty-meter wall, from digging, cleaning, mixing lime, transporting, putting up the wall, tamping, plus the number of people who cut wattle, there were a total of seventy people.
This circle of walls was actually built manually from beginning to end.
After successfully accumulating experience in this trading market, Xu Chen officially began to use rammed earth to build houses in the Ba ethnic minority's residence.
In order to speed up the construction, Xu Chen asked the wood processing workshop to make more rammed earth molds, and asked the smelting workshop to pour and make more bronze ramming tools, striving to complete the construction of the Ba people's houses within a month. At the same time, he also recruited some familiar people from each tribe.
Men who built houses watched and learned together and even participated in the work themselves, accelerating the promotion of rammed earth technology.
Time flies into November, and the weather becomes colder and colder.
But the two sides of the Jicang River near the Gonghuo tribe are even more lively.
As time went by, various tribal settlements planned around the royal city began to enter into house construction. Simple house frames began to rise from the ground, scattered on the vast gray-brown exposed river beach, which looked very
of eye-catching.
The Ba people made the fastest progress. By around mid-November, four nearby rammed earth buildings had taken shape. The eaves and gables had reached the designed height. They began to use pottery bricks to build window edges and door frames, as well as a large number of beams.
, purlins, and thatch also began to be piled up near the house in preparation. In the simple carpentry shed, a group of carpenters began to build doors and windows according to specifications.
Since the completion of the wall test of the trading market, Xu Chen has not participated in the construction of houses. He only took a group of people such as Gu Heju and others on horseback to patrol back and forth every day, and most of his energy was focused on firing bricks and tiles.
Whether a house is built with rammed earth or mud bricks, the doors and windows must be reinforced with ceramic bricks and lintels, otherwise they will easily deform over time.
The ceramic brick manufacturing process has now matured. The clay is also molded into a standard-sized clay brick that is twenty centimeters long, ten centimeters wide and five centimeters thick. It is dried in the shade and then fired in a kiln.
Because pottery bricks do not need to be as fine as pottery, the clay production can be a little more sloppy. Thousands of bricks can be fired in one kiln and can be fired in about ten days. The production speed is still very good.
But terracotta is a lot more troublesome.
First of all, the mold is very special. It is necessary to make a semi-conical barrel-shaped mold first. Four convex ribs are made on the outside of the mold according to the quartering method, which is called a tile barrel.
The bucket is thicker at the bottom and thinner at the top, and can be folded inward. When the two halves of the handles are closed, it becomes a semi-conical bucket. Use a clay bow to cut the mud strips of suitable width and thickness into a piece of clay of suitable thickness, and surround it.
On the outside of the tile barrel, use a tile knife to smooth the joints and the outside, cut off the excess part along the marking line of the tile barrel, place it on the flat sand and fold the two halves of the handle inward, so that the tile can be
The bucket is taken out from the middle of the mud base, so that a hollow semi-conical mud base is obtained.
After the mud is half dry, gently break it with your hands, and the mud will break along the ridge marks on the four tile barrels, forming four tiles with the same size and width at the bottom and narrow at the top.
Finally, these tiles are put into the kiln and burned like bricks, and they become pottery tiles.
These things seem simple and have been used in China for thousands of years, but Xu Chen still spent a lot of effort to actually make them.
The most difficult part is naturally the clay bucket.
Fortunately, the Ba carpenters already had experience in making cowhide drums. Under Xu Chen's repeated guidance, several carpenters spent nearly a month and finally succeeded in building the Ba's rammed earth house just as the beams were being put up.
.
However, Xu Chen did not intend to use terracotta tiles in the residences of the Ba people and other tribes.
Because under the current conditions, thatch is still the simplest and most economical cover.
Not only is the production of terracotta tiles still in the exploratory stage, the production speed and time cannot keep up, but the output and input are also too high.
Digging soil, mixing mud, making mud bricks, tile bricks, and firing all require a lot of manpower and time.
The huge cost cannot be provided for free, so each tribe can only produce or purchase it by itself, but no matter which method, no single tribe can complete and afford it at the moment.
In addition, the beams and purlins are currently designed according to the plan of covering thatch. Not only the load-bearing requirements are limited, but also the requirements are very low. If tiles are used, the beams and purlins must be reinstalled and designed, which requires extremely high flatness and bearing capacity.
Otherwise, if tens of thousands of tiles are placed on a house, it will collapse accidentally.
Therefore, the process of making terracotta tiles is now gradually familiar and accumulated, and will be used in the construction of the royal city next year.