In the next few days, Xu Chen stayed at the tung forest camp to guide the construction of the oil pressing mill.
Compared with other industries such as kilns and smelting, oil pressing is the most complex industrial project invented by Xu Chen so far.
In addition to the common material selection and cleaning, it also involves various links such as drying, crushing, cooking, cake making, and pressing.
Each of these links has special and necessary tools.
Drying requires a drying room, crushing requires a mill, cooking requires a stove and steamer, making oil cakes requires special copper hoops, and even very skilled skills.
As for the final pressing step, it is even more complicated. Just making the wood press is a huge project.
Fortunately, Xu Chen has already successfully verified these processes in the Ba people, and after several years of accumulation, he already has a group of skilled craftsmen.
At the moment, Xu Chen only needs to copy the Ba tribe's oil pressing mill intact.
When he came this time, he packed up several teams of Ba craftsmen who were involved in making the pressing house and responsible for oil pressing. Just in case, he even brought along the masons and kiln workers.
This time we brought a team of 70 people, but among them there were less than 50 elite hunters who were actually responsible for maintaining security and dealing with the white-haired four-eyed demons downstream. The others came to help build the squeeze house and participate in
Artisan who presses oil.
You can rely on mountains to eat mountains, and you can rely on water to eat water.
Relying on this vast virgin forest, you only need to cut down various logs and simply process them to start building houses and various sheds and workshops.
Therefore, a group of hunter craftsmen led dozens of barbarian men to start another round of logging and construction work in a dense area of tung trees not far from the camp.
In addition, in order to allow the camp to have good and sustainable development, Xu Chen also asked people to start looking for a suitable location to start building a kiln and firing lime bricks and pottery.
This place is far away from the Gonghuo Basin, and it is difficult to travel by land or water. Not only is it difficult to transport large pottery, even small and medium-sized pots and pots are extremely troublesome to get.
Oil extraction and cooking inevitably require the use of a large amount of pottery.
Even ordinary clay pots are too small, and later oil press mills used large clay pots.
Unfortunately, until now, the Ba people have not mastered the technology of making and firing large pottery jars.
The largest clay pot at the moment is about fifty centimeters high, with a round belly and a closed mouth. It can hold at least twenty liters of water, or it can be called a clay pot. It is indeed big enough for daily water and pickled vegetables, but it is not enough to hold oil for large-scale wine making.
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The larger the pottery, the more difficult and troublesome it is to make. It is also very troublesome to transport. Moreover, this thing is fragile. It travels hundreds of miles over mountains and ridges, and faces various beasts and complex environments along the way. Ten can be delivered intact.
Even if it succeeds when it reaches five, it may be completely destroyed under special circumstances.
Everyone, please go and try it soon.]
Therefore, to solve the problem of oil storage, pottery production must be done locally.
As for transportation, the pottery is discarded first.
According to the requirements, it is best to use wooden barrels.
However, the production technology of wooden barrels is currently insufficient, and there is no time. Xu Chen plans to go to the Cicha tribe to make a batch of large bamboo barrels.
After arranging the oil press, he would deal with the white-haired four-eyed demon, and then go down the river to visit the Cicha tribe.
Seven or eight days passed in the blink of an eye.
An enclosed wooden shed compound was built.
It covers an area of about three acres. A row of closed houses are used as storage warehouses. The other three sides are the sheds required for material selection, drying, milling, cooking and pressing. In addition, a one-acre-sized square is flattened out in the center of the open space.
There is a drying ground and a pergola recommended for storing firewood outside the yard.
A group of hunters and dozens of barbarians, under the command of a group of craftsmen, have built simple drying rooms and steaming stoves with mud and stone, and installed stone mills.
In addition, the wood press, which is made from a whole piece of paulownia wood with a diameter of more than one meter, is almost completed, and the piling of the press room has begun to prepare for installation.
In the past few days, brick and tile kilns, lime kilns, and pottery factories have also begun to be built, and they have also reached some scale.
It is now late autumn and almost winter. Although it is still warm afterwards, the tung trees, tung trees and ginkgo trees around the lake have already turned red and yellow and are beginning to wither.
A gust of autumn wind blew by, and the golden red leaves flying in the air around the lake were extremely beautiful. All kinds of ripe fruits fell like rain, and the smashed squirrels and monkeys flew all over the mountain.
In order to collect these fruits in time and prevent them from being devoured by wild boars, monkeys, squirrels, pigs, badgers and other wild animals, Xu Chen asked a group of hunters to make a large number of simple backpacks and baskets using reeds, canes and even thorns in their spare time.
The barbarian women, children, old and weak people spent the whole day picking up three kinds of fruits in the mountains and forests near the camp.
Although some of these three fruits are edible and some are poisonous, Xu Chen is afraid that the oils will be mixed with each other in the future, but in fact they are very easy to distinguish with the naked eye, and there is no need to distinguish them carefully. However, these barbarians have simple minds and can easily mix them up.
It is more troublesome to clean up, and a certain degree of confusion is inevitable.
If you only eat it on weekdays, you won’t go wrong.
But it’s hard to tell when it’s extracted into oil.
Therefore, when Xu Chen arranged for people to pick up, he would ask the hunters who accompanied him to carefully teach these barbarians to distinguish, pick and harvest by categories, and then send them back to clean and dry according to different varieties.
After a few days of this, these barbarians were able to distinguish them clearly and dealt with them quite carefully.
The three types of wild fruits collected are first simply classified and then the peels are removed to leave the core. This process is cumbersome and time-consuming.
But Xu Chen didn't have a good way, so he could only let some barbarian elders and children do it slowly.
Although tung oil is very important, there is currently a shortage of people everywhere, and it is impossible to mobilize more people to participate in this matter. We can only rely on a group of craftsmen and these local barbarians to slowly make it.
Fortunately, these fruits are everywhere and are easy to pick. In just four or five days, more than 3,000 kilograms of various fruits were harvested. Among them, tung trees were the main harvest target, accounting for most of the total.
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Of course, these are all wet fruits with shells. After processing and drying, they will only be a thousand pounds of dried fruits at most, but this harvest is already very gratifying.
According to the oil yield rate of tung seeds, one day's harvest can produce about 20 kilograms of oil. If it continues for three months, nearly two thousand kilograms of tung oil can be harvested this year.
With so much tung oil, not to mention shipbuilding, it is estimated that the doors, windows and floors of the palaces and houses in the royal city can be brushed next to each other.
At this point, Xu Chen finally breathed a sigh of relief.
As for Gongtong, Xu Chen has not yet planned to collect and process it on a large scale. Although Gongtung oil can be used for cooking, it requires special stone grinding and pressing room processing. There is no time to complete it now, especially the stone grinding. This time he only brought one
Vice, cannot be mixed.
In addition, for safety reasons, we need to find a new place to build the oil pressing mill. It must not be too close to the tung oil mill, otherwise it will easily cause chaos.
As for ginkgo fruits, there is no need to harvest them on a large scale. Although they can be eaten, they are not of much significance if they can only be used as snacks.
The country of Ba has just begun the farming era, and the area near the royal city is developing well. In addition, the Ba tribe, Gonghuo tribe, and Yu Gong tribe have begun to solve the problem of food and clothing. Other tribes are still struggling on the poverty line. The demand for snacks is very small, and they have not yet
It is so luxurious that men, women, old and young can just sit together, eat melon seeds and chat.
Therefore, Xu Chen’s requirement for harvesting wild fruits is to harvest all tung trees, ginkgo trees, and tung trees. Those near the camp will be harvested, and those that are too far away will be discarded.
After the harvesting, pressing house and kiln were almost arranged, Xu Chen took the time to explore the lake within seven or eight miles near the camp. Based on the traces of lake flooding, he drew pictures on the beach near the camp.
Thousands of acres of farmland were taken out and prepared to be burned for reclamation.
Shrub areas far away from the lakeshore need to be reclaimed into dry land for growing wheat, beans and other cereals.
In the shallow areas where a large number of thorns and weeds grow, paddy fields are being developed.
While Xu Chen was busy, Lei also led more than a dozen hunters to build a simple dock out of wood on the shore of the lake near the camp, and weaved six new rafts.
After staying in the camp for a full ten days, all the work was installed properly, the press house was built, the brick kiln and the pottery kiln were built, and the fumigation kiln was ready to be put into operation. Xu Chen felt that there was no problem.
After that, a team of twenty craftsmen and ten hunters were left in the camp to be responsible for extracting oil and supervising the cultivation of fields. They took the remaining hunters and headed east on a raft under the leadership of Lei.
…
Although the Tung Forest Lake is much smaller than the Weishan Lake near the Cicha Tribe, it is still more than ten miles in length and width. Wandering around in it on a few small rafts will feel as small as duckweed.
Fortunately, it is winter now and the water in the lake is stable. Apart from the refreshing cold breeze blowing against my face, the calm lake is surrounded by green mountains and the trees on the lakeshore are intertwined with gold and red. The picturesque scenery is refreshing and refreshing.
Xu Chen was not in a hurry, so he asked a group of hunters to slowly draw a bamboo raft and slowly head east along the lake shore about a mile away.
Two hours later, Lei pointed to a gap where mountains met in front of him and said loudly: "Your Majesty the Witch King, that is the exit of the Great Lake."
Xu Chen looked at the slightly white sun in the sky and felt that there seemed to be signs of a change in the sky, so he stopped dawdling and ordered the fleet to speed up.
Half an hour later, six rafts formed a line and left the lake along a canyon about one mile wide, officially entering the channel leading to the Wulong River.