When asked about the efficiency of the craftsman camp, Li Mengxi went back and slept for half a day, then got up and had something to eat, and then left for the craftsman camp.

When we arrived at the blacksmith camp, there were already "turtle shells" everywhere. The so-called turtle shells were the molds made by the craftsmen by mixing mud with wheat straw and lining them with linen.

Each mold is small, because the plow head to be cast is relatively small, and the mold is as big as a turtle shell.

The leader of the craftsmen came over and said that the mold can be dried over a fire, but it will crack if it is dried. It will not be used for a long time, or it can be dried, but it will take several days.

It is said that if a worker wants to do his job well, he must sharpen his tools. A delay of one or two days will have little impact on the casting progress. As long as there are enough molds, production will not be affected.

Li Mengxi asked, "How many molds are there?"

The leader of the craftsmen replied, "Eight hundred."

Li Mengxi was silent. He thought, if Mr. Li just took a nap, eight hundred molds would be enough?

The army has more than 100,000 manpower, not to mention 800, 8,000 can be accomplished in one day, and the productivity potential is far from being tapped.

Having finished recharging his energy, Li Mengxi is full of energy. Now let’s start forging the sword!

I still remember that craftsmen said that if you want to make a sword, you need a fire cabinet and a quenching cylinder.

The quenching cylinder is easy to understand. It is a large quenching vat filled with water, but what is a fire cabinet and what is it used for?

Li Mengxi looked at the so-called fire cabinet, which looked like a square chimney or a barbecue stove. It was long and horizontal, with charcoal at the bottom and seals at the top and back.

No wonder it is called a fire cabinet, it looks like a cabinet.

Before the fire cabinet could understand, Li Mengxi saw another similar fire cabinet next to the fire cabinet. This fire cabinet was filled with plant ash for some unknown reason.

, it looks like it needs to be heated by burning wood, but I can’t quite understand.

The craftsmen are busy forging knives. It is said that craftsmen who are proficient in forging weapons are far rarer than ordinary blacksmiths, and senior craftsmen who can often make magical weapons are worth a lot of money. These craftsmen selected from the army are not careful.

You know, if you look closely, it's amazing. No matter what kind of iron tool you want to forge, even if it's a knife, you don't have to look outside, there will be a good knife forger in the camp.

The quality of the blacksmiths in the craft camp is very good. After all, they are more than a hundred people carefully selected from hundreds of thousands of people. It is not an exaggeration to say that they are the best of the best.

When everything was ready, a craftsman recommended by the crowd who knew how to forge swords came over and asked carefully if he could set up a eucalyptus sacrifice to honor the ancestor.

"Of course!" Li Mengxi nodded, "Please do."

Li Mengxi was very polite and walked to the side to make room for the craftsmen.

However, give me a chicken feather, go away a chicken feather, people said that they wanted to offer sacrifices to the founders Ou Yezi and Lu Ban. What they meant was that they wanted to kill a chicken, take the blood and throw it into the furnace as a sacrifice, but Li Mengxi did not understand the deeper meaning of the words.

Standing directly next to it.

Li Mengxi walked away and stood on the edge. The craftsman stood awkwardly and stepped forward, neither standing nor doing anything.

Fortunately, it was Guan Yu. Guan Yu understood the ways of the world better. Guan Yu came to the rescue at the right time. Guan Yu said, "Xi'er, please bring me a rooster. To forge a sword, you need to sacrifice it to the sword furnace."

So it turned out that Li Mengxi suddenly realized that when it came to roosters, Li Mengxi was a little reluctant to part with them, because there were more than 100,000 people in the army, and there were only over a hundred chickens, ducks and livestock left, and among them, there were only two roosters left.

Thinking about it again, if you want to kill the rooster, just kill it, otherwise it will crow every morning before dawn, which will make people very noisy.

Simply, Li Mengxi asked someone to catch the chicken.

Soon, the rooster was brought, along with the daggers needed by the craftsmen. To assist in the sacrifice, Li Mengxi also specially asked people to bring an ox head, a wooden tablet, and grains commonly used for sacrifices.

Li Mengxi's ability in arranging sacrifices is very outstanding, which can be seen from the splendid and beautiful altar during the previous Danri Festival.

The blacksmiths just wanted to offer sacrifices at random, but as a result, there were roosters, cow heads, and grains, which were very solemn.

A group of craftsmen set up a low table in front of the iron-making furnace, placed the sacrifices, and then used a short knife to cut the rooster against its neck. The rooster fluttered and its blood spilled. The leading knife-forging craftsman grabbed the chicken wings and threw the chicken into the furnace.

, the rooster screamed, and instantly turned into ashes.

Afterwards, the craftsmen knelt down and solemnly worshiped the two ancestors, Lu Ban and Ou Yezi, and the sacrifice ended.

Li Mengxi watched the entire sacrificial process from the sidelines. He had nothing to say. Meat was extremely precious, and he had to throw the rooster into the stove to burn it. Although he knew this was the custom, it was too wasteful.

It would be fine if we offered sacrifices once a year, but if we had to offer sacrifices and throw away chickens every time the furnace was opened, it would be a huge loss.

After that, the knife forging begins.

Li Mengxi did not plan to forge the first knife with filled steel. He planned to see the complete technical process of forging an ordinary iron knife first, and then make another one with filled steel.

The steps for forging a knife are no different from that for forging other iron tools. They both take the iron out of the iron pool first, and then smash the molten iron.

During the forging, many people cooperated. The blacksmith in charge used a small hammer to knock it, and the other two people, one on the left and one on the right, raised the big hammer and banged it back and forth.

Then the small hammer hits again, and the big hammer clangs twice.

During the continuous beating process with the big hammer and the small hammer, sparks flew everywhere, and the molten iron was beaten into a long strip.

This process of making long strips is like kneading dough, kneading soft molten iron into iron strips.

After that, there was a long process of hundreds of forgings. The blacksmiths kept the same frequency. After hammering with dozens or hundreds of hammers to make the iron thin and flat, they picked it up with tongs, smashed it vertically, and then folded it in half.

layer, and then continue forging.

During the forging process, the temperature of the iron dropped very quickly. After two rounds of forging, the iron became cold. The craftsmen had to stop forging and put the iron back into the furnace for reheating.

Li Mengxi counted secretly beside him. To thin an iron bar from the thickness, it takes more than a hundred hammers, and then it takes four or five hammers to fold it in the middle. After the iron bar is folded, it is forged again to make it thin, which takes another hundred hammers.

Folding and forging once requires more than two hundred hammers.

If it were to be forged a hundred times, it would require as many as 20,000 hammers, and the workload was extremely staggering.

The forged iron blocks were reheated in the furnace, and the blacksmiths had to take a rest. After two rounds of forging, several blacksmiths who were swinging hammers were already sweating profusely.

This chapter is not finished yet, please click on the next page to continue reading the exciting content! According to the characteristics of forged iron, as the iron is beaten back, the larger the iron, the tighter it becomes, and the harder it is beaten, the stronger it becomes, which makes the forging more and more laborious.

It gets more difficult later on.

As expected, blacksmithing was very tiring, and Li Mengxi felt tired for the blacksmiths. He silently thought about what kind of machinery could save the forging work, whether the European hydraulic forging hammer had a complex structure, and whether it could be copied.

No matter how complex it is, it doesn't matter how complicated the gadgets before the industrial revolution can be. This is the land of Han Dynasty, where technology and wisdom shine brightly, and the technology of water power utilization is just as powerful.

Li Mengxi thought that he could make a waterwheel, and then think of ways to bring a big hammer that he could lift up and down, so that he could have a hydraulic forging hammer.

——

The process of forging iron material took up most of the workload of forging the knife. After a long time, Li Mengxi counted and folded and forged it more than thirty times. Forged it, can you make a knife?"

The knife forger raised his hand to wipe the sweat from his forehead, and said breathlessly, "Although it can be done with thirty forgings, it is not as good as one with one hundred forgings..."

The implication is that it is better to forge a better one.

Li Mengxi nodded, "Just thirty exercises is enough."

The knife forger hesitated for a moment, and could only stop hammering the iron. He held the hammer a little shorter and tapped the iron lightly. The place where I hit it with the small hammer made a slight ding.

After listening to the clanging sound of the blacksmith's hammer for a long time, the clanging sound suddenly changed, and Li Mengxi easily heard the difference.

He suddenly realized, oh, it turns out that when it comes to shaping the sword, you have to use less force to strike it.

To beat a thick and short iron bar into a long and slender blade, you have to beat and stretch it bit by bit. This process took a long time, probably a full forging time, and then the blade was roughly formed. .

The blacksmith clamped the knife bar together and saw that it was a red iron bar long on the arm, with a pointed head and a thin tail, vaguely resembling a ring-headed knife.

After that, the blacksmith with the big hammer left the scene, and the knifesmith with the main hammer was left with a small hammer, clanking rapidly and carefully, and the knocking sound was continuous.

This is probably fine-tuning and fine-tuning to create regular details of the tip and blade.

The process of hammering with a small hammer lasted for about two forgings. During this process, the knifemaker kept picking up the knife and putting one end on the iron pier, holding the other end up, and looking up to see if it was straight.

Li Mengxi saw that the blacksmith's action of holding the knife blade with pliers was awkward and dangerous. He thought that if thick gloves were made of protective materials, it would be much easier to pick up the knife blade and look at it. , there is no need to hold it with pliers dangling.

Moreover, the extremely large pliers that are as long as the arms, the kind of pliers used to hold iron pots, are not very useful for fixing knife strips.

There are too few tools.

Even though Li Mengxi was a layman, he could tell that the knifemaker's tools were not handy.

Thinking more deeply, I realized that it was not right. The forging tools currently in the army were bought in a hurry, and then collected some from the hands of civilians. They were pieced together in a mess, and it was normal for them to be incomplete.

If a worker wants to do his job well, he must first sharpen his tools.

There is obviously a shortage of handy tools, so why don't the blacksmiths make some tools for themselves?

They don't understand?

It's not because I don't understand, but because of other reasons.

Probably the blacksmiths were too embarrassed to ask for anything. Although the pliers and hammers for blacksmithing were imperfect, they were available and were barely usable, so the blacksmiths were too embarrassed to continue asking for them.

Furthermore, after all, we are in the army, and all iron materials are public. Without orders, the blacksmiths dare not use iron to make tools for themselves.

I didn't say it, and I didn't dare. If I hadn't carefully looked at the forging process this time, I wouldn't have discovered this problem.

Li Mengxi suddenly realized that the invention and improvement of tools were valuable creations.

But to allow blacksmiths to create their own tools, they must have a certain amount of free time, there must be a certain incentive mechanism, and they must have some excess iron in their hands.

The current situation of the craftsman camp is that there are three shifts a day, it is not busy, there is enough free time, and the reward mechanism has been implemented for a long time.

However, the blacksmiths had no iron at their disposal, not even iron, so they invented a hammer tool.

Li Mengxi was deeply aware of this shortcoming.

Not only the blacksmith camp, but also the carpenter camp. The craftsmen in the carpenter camp do not have private wood at their disposal. So until now, even if the craftsmen think of marching on the car while doing carpentry work, even if the carpenters think of the possibility of moving the cart

Turn it over and use it as a workbench. Even if the carpenters can come up with many good suggestions, there will be no improvements in tools!
To be continued...