In Powell's imagination, a blacksmith shop in a village or town was just a closed shed. There were several large furnaces built with bricks, and one or two blacksmiths worked with five or six apprentices, sweating profusely and swinging the forging hammer around the anvil.
But when Powell asked for directions and walked to the forge in Harmony Village, the 'blacksmith shop' that Zhou Qingfeng spent several hundred gold coins to build was far beyond his imagination.
The mouth of the iron melting furnace is radiant with fire, and the gushing air circulates in the heat storage room. The tall chimney is full of heat. A ceramic pipe leads to water flow, which not only cools the temperature of the chimney, but also provides hot water to the villagers in the village.
The design and scale of the iron melting furnace and heat storage room alone stopped Powell in his tracks. He looked up at the chimney, which was seven or eight meters high. After a brief assessment, he felt that this place was completely unlike a newly built place in the black forest.
village.
"Hey..., are you new here?" A rough-looking dwarf came out of the forge, beckoned and shouted: "Come here, come here, I will arrange a job for you."
Walking past the iron melting furnace is the animal-powered crusher. Two horses drive the rollers to preliminary crush the mined iron ore. The crushed ore has been screened and refined and crushed multiple times, which can improve the grade, reduce fuel consumption, and improve the quality of the iron ore.
Smelting efficiency.
Zhou Qingfeng has always wanted to make coke, but it is technically difficult. At the same time, he has not found suitable coal with high calorific value. The peat in the Voodoo Swamp can only be used as ordinary fuel and cannot be used for smelting.
Harmony Village can only use charcoal, which supposedly can be used for smelting. I don’t know what’s wrong with the smelting iron furnace. The temperature of the furnace cannot rise, and liquid iron cannot be obtained at present.
Behind the iron melting furnace is the forging field. The smelted sponge iron is pulled out from the furnace mouth and will soon enter the next step of the forging process - the quality of the sponge iron is too poor and must be forged to remove impurities, which is completely inconsistent with the weekly schedule.
Qingfeng's expectations.
Smelting is an extremely professional science, and even refractory bricks are acidic and alkaline. For Harmony Village, which just digs mud and burns bricks to build furnaces, there are too many technology trees that are lacking.
But it didn't take long for Harmony Village to be established. The current level of success exceeded the expectations of all the blacksmiths and apprentices in the forging place. In their eyes, this was already a miracle. This miracle even frightened Powell. The Harmony Village hidden deep in the black forest
There is actually a forge where hundreds of people work.
Although there is no coke, the Black Forest provides abundant and cheap wood as raw materials, and the iron ore valley also has an endless supply of ore, which provides convenient conditions for smelting production. Although the sponge iron is a bit rotten, the output is still a lot. So.
If it continues to develop, it will be difficult for this village to become rich or not.
"Give me an anvil and a forging hammer, and I can make anything you want." Powell looked at several blacksmith apprentices who were forging with hammers, and regained some confidence, "I am a very good blacksmith.
.”
The dwarf in the forging field squeezed Powell's arm and nodded in approval. But he shook his head and said: "You don't need to do what an apprentice does. Our forging here is also different from other places. It doesn't require too much exquisite skills, but it does.
It takes some patience.”
"Patience?" Powell smiled again: "My patience is also very good."
However, the dwarf still shook his head and continued to lead Powell towards the forging yard. The latter soon saw a huge forging machine at work. The forging hammer was constantly moving up and down, hitting the sponge iron placed on the anvil.
The size of this forging machine exceeded Powell's imagination. What shocked him even more was that the forging machine did not rely on human or animal power. The moving forging hammer seemed to be moving on its own, and the forging force was quite powerful. Every impact made a deafening sound.
The sound shook my chest and lungs.
"This is..." Powell's mind was buzzing, but he didn't know how to describe his mood at the moment. He had been a blacksmith for many years before becoming famous, and he did have exquisite forging skills. But he had never seen it before
Get over this clanking thing.
"When did you dwarves create something so horrific?"
The dwarf shook his head, "No, we didn't make it. Every blacksmith who comes here will be frightened by this thing, and we dwarves are no exception. This is a wind-powered forging machine, which uses the never-ending wind in the black forest to drive the forging.
Hammer. This thing is very powerful!"
It is indeed very powerful. The forging hammer is at least 50 kilograms. It can be pulled up to a height of one meter and dropped. The strength is far beyond that of a normal human. Even if Powell exerts the "power of a bull", he cannot strike with such force. It would only take a giant from the sky.
Comparable to it.
"Whose idea was this?"
"It was the idea of the local lord, our Lord Victor Hugo. He brought a group of human blacksmiths from the Iron Ore Valley in the Black Forest and built this thing after the windmill in the Elf Forge.
The quality of the forged sponge iron will be greatly improved and then handed over to the apprentices in the forge for further forging to produce high-quality tools and weapons."
"The lord here actually knows how to forge?"
"I guess so."
The dwarf led Powell inside the forge, where he could see a ten-meter-high windmill rotating on the roof. The windmill was not large, but the advantage was that the power was even and almost never stopped.
According to the dwarves, there is only one forging machine installed in the forge. The machine is still very rough, and problems arise from time to time and need to be repaired and adjusted. In order to make this thing work properly, more than a dozen human and dwarf craftsmen have to guard it day and night.
Lots of patience.
Because no one has used this thing in the past, everyone has no experience. Mr. Hugo even ignored it. He only said that if he built a reliable windmill and wind forging machine, he would give out bonuses to make everyone happy.
"Although this forging machine is very powerful, it breaks easily because of its high power. It must be stopped for maintenance every one or two hours of operation, otherwise it will fall apart on its own."
The dwarf kept complaining, but his tone was full of pride. Because as long as the forging machine works for one hour, its forging capacity exceeds that of a hundred skilled blacksmiths. The tough iron material is as soft as dough in front of it, saving a lot of time.
Less effort.
Most of the more than one hundred apprentices in the forge are not considered blacksmiths. They are responsible for further forging, modifying and other fine processing of the iron materials processed by the forging machine. Their production efficiency is far higher than that of ordinary blacksmiths from other worlds.
As the saying goes, ‘Strength can produce miracles’, the forging hammer of the air-powered forging machine can easily solve many problems such as looseness, porousness, deformation and oxidation in sponge iron. This is a problem that even a skilled blacksmith cannot solve.
In order to develop the smelting industry, Zhou Qingfeng tried his best to bring semi-finished mechanical parts from the real world. However, in the past, he could only bring less than 13 kilograms of items each time, and was forced to use real iron melting furnaces, crushers, and forgings.
The machine is constantly dismantled and simplified, and then reassembled after arriving in another world.
However, the assembly process was plagued with problems.
But......
Powell casually picked up a semi-finished forged long knife. With a flick of the knife, he could feel that the knife body was fine and fine in texture. Even in several southern cities where the forging industry is developed, this is top quality.
In that moment, Powell actually changed his mind - I want to master the secret of this forging machine, and I cannot let the evil Victor Hugo block this incredible technology. I must steal it.