The grandness of Li Mengxi's plan will be astonishing if anyone looks into the complexity and arduousness of it.

The entire huge plan, in order to test the batch heat treatment technology, required the construction of one hundred earthen kilns. It took two thousand people, dozens of craftsmen, and a city-builder to build the earthen kilns.

Although there is an earth kiln, there is still a shortage of steel bars. In order to make steel bars, a new steel-filled tank must be built, which requires a lot of manpower and material resources.

After the steel filling tank is built, it is necessary to make steel bars with the same specifications. To achieve the same quality, forging cannot be done, so casting is required. And for casting, the simple mold cannot support thousands of castings, so it must be cast.

Turning over the mold several times requires a lot of manpower.

After that, steel bars were available, and heat treatment was troublesome. For artificial heat treatment, different craftsmen have different experience and skills, so the heat treatment is very different. The quenching process is slightly different, and the performance of steel is very different.

Therefore, in order to balance the quenching effect, we can only build an extra-long heating tank with a length of 300 feet.

To build a three-hundred-foot-long earthen trench requires a huge amount of manpower.

After that, a thousand steel bars were quenched at the same time, which required enough iron tongs. There were not enough iron tongs, so the blacksmiths had to work overtime to make them.

Finally, there is charcoal. Due to different production processes, charcoal burned from different woods and charcoal burned from different batches have greatly different firepower.

Therefore, it is best to use the same wood and burn nine thousand kilograms of charcoal in one kiln.

And there was no such big kiln, so a new kiln had to be built.

Building a huge kiln requires time and a lot of manpower and material resources.

Not to mention that after the charcoal is burned, a lot of manpower and material resources must be spent to crush the charcoal into powder.

The entire test plan is only the first round of testing, which requires swords from the combat camp, materials from the logistics camp, manpower from the civilian camp, and many resource supports. It requires the unified efforts of nine departments including the blacksmith camp, carpenter camp, pottery camp, and construction camp.

Collaboration requires technical support from more than twenty types of work such as iron smelting, carbon making, construction, measurement, heat treatment, molds, etc. It requires the full assistance of up to 5,000 manpower. In short, it requires strong organizational capabilities to achieve it.

Fortunately, the army had gathered various craftsmen early, and there were a large number of technicians available. If not, let Li Mengxi come. Li Mengxi didn't know how to measure, let alone how to build a three hundred-foot-long horizontal trough. He even

I don't know how to make a regular mold.

Without the joint efforts of everyone, and without the large amount of manpower and material resources in the army to mobilize, Li Mengxi would not have been able to complete the test.

Or to put it another way, the investment in technology research and development is huge and money is constantly being spent.

The experiment planned by Li Mengxi requires the manufacture of one thousand steel bars. The purpose of manufacturing these one thousand steel bars is only for the experiment and has no other use.

The cost is much higher than making a thousand knives.

It is known that a low-end sword costs 500 coins upwards, a top-grade sword costs no money, and a mid-range knife costs two coins.

The cost of one round of testing, calculated in terms of cost, is at least five thousand dollars.

This is still the first round of testing.

One round is only 5,000 guan. If this continues, if there is no result, the rebel army will be poor sooner or later.

At the same time, science is the primary productive force. When technology makes breakthroughs, it will bring huge feedback to productivity, and the benefits will be far higher than the investment.

Li Mengxi's grand plan began.

On the first day, the peasants built half of the earthen kilns, and under the strict orders of the city builders who had strict requirements, they repaired 11 of the kilns and destroyed the six that were not up to standard.

At the same time, the blacksmiths finished selecting two thousand knives and sorted them for storage, and began to rush to make a thousand iron tongs. At the same time, they began to dig a new iron pond for filling steel.

The construction team built a huge charcoal kiln. Half of the kiln was built, and the remaining height needed to be built up using ladders.

The Zizhong team had already chopped up a large amount of poplar wood and piled it up in a big pile.

On the first day, Li Mengxi collected a large number of water tanks, buckets and other water-holding tools for later use.

The first day was spent busy.

The second day.

One hundred earthen kilns were completely built, and the serious city builders were measuring each one with a rope ruler. Many of the earthen kilns had flaws and still needed to be repaired. At the same time, in each earthen kiln, a charcoal pool of the same specifications was built.

Blacksmith camp, the blacksmith camp has quickly produced more than 800 iron tongs, and the quantity is almost completed. At the same time, the steel filling tank has been dug. At the same time, the most skilled craftsmen are carving the molds carefully, holding the bamboo

Little by little, I shaved off the mold and made various modifications to make it thicker. It took me half a day to finally make a small mold.

The groove in the mold is four feet long, one and a half inches wide, and 0.8 cents thick. The thickness is generally even from front to back without any flaws.

Also on the second day, the construction team finished the huge charcoal kiln.

On this day, Li Mengxi collected more buckets, water tanks and other objects, and asked the blacksmiths to help make a clamping platform for testing.

The so-called clamping platform is two large iron blocks with a small slit in the middle, which can facilitate the insertion of steel bars in the middle and fixation, and then force can be exerted from both ends to bend and control.

On this day, Guan Yu's military training is still the same. The two meals a day for the civilian husband and soldiers are still porridge and a meal of meatballs. The meatballs are as delicious as ever, and the soup cooked with fried meatballs is still making the civilian soldiers lick their bowls.

Done.

The third day.

With the help of a large amount of manpower, one hundred earthen kilns were finally built and repaired.

All one hundred earth kilns are generally six feet short and one foot wide. All earth kilns are standard rectangular parallelepipeds. Starting from the first one going down, the length of the kiln body starts from five feet, and in order

The length of the kiln increased further, and finally, when it was added to the end, the length of the kiln reached one hundred and five feet, which was more than three feet long.

After the earthen kiln was built, we had to take a lot of firewood to dry the earthen kiln due to the tight schedule.

At the same time, the city builders began to prepare to build a three-hundred-foot-long heating tank next to the earth kiln cluster.

How long is this 300-foot heating tank? Two miles.

Due to the terrain and the difficulty of construction, etc., for this 300-foot-long trough, the city builders, after obtaining Li Mengxi's consent, decided to build the trough in a roundabout way.

This chapter is not over yet, please click on the next page to continue reading! Before construction, it took half a day for the craftsmen to measure the length, and another half day to insert the benchmarks and make construction arrangements.

On the same day, the blacksmith camp's target of one thousand iron tongs was finally completed. After counting, the blacksmith captain found that there were more than one hundred iron tongs, totaling more than one thousand one hundred iron tongs.

The steel-filling pool in the craftsman's camp was also prepared on the same day, and the preparations for the steel-filling were completed.

The construction team worked hard for a long time and finally completed the giant charcoal kiln. Like ordinary earthen kilns, the newly built charcoal kiln also needs to be heated and dried.

On this third day, Li Mengxi inspected various places and learned about the progress of all projects.

The fourth day.

When the smelting began, the craftsmen put a large number of intact swords into the furnace and began to smelt them.

The work of burning charcoal also started. The craftsmen stuffed a large amount of charcoal into the kiln that was several feet high, filling half of the kiln. Then they added fire and ignited the wood in the entire kiln until the fire was strong.

, immediately sealed the kiln with yellow mud.

On this day, the 300-foot-long trough for heating was built in half a day. The trough is slender, requires little work, and can be erected quickly. However, the trough requires precision workmanship and needs to be equally deep from beginning to end.

The groove width needs to be the same from beginning to end, and it needs to be level from beginning to end.

The peasants who helped did not have the ability to repair the trough to a level state, so the city builders had to do it themselves.

The city-builder was holding a ruler and compass, holding a rope, and was bent over the earth trough, one eye closed and the other open, aiming at the level of one foot after another. He held a scraper in his hand, and someone behind him followed him carrying mud.

If the uneven areas are convex, use a scraper to smooth them out little by little. If they are dented, use mud to cover them.

Every time he repairs one or two feet, the craftsman will take a ladle of water and pour half a ladle of water into it, watching the flow of the water to see if the repair is flat or uneven.

The heating tank was repaired extremely slowly.

The fifth day.

After a day and night of smelting on the fourth day, the two thousand swords were all melted into iron and flowed into the pool, and the steel-filling technique began.

The blacksmiths followed the method described by Li Mengxi, using an iron mixing gun to stir the iron juice. If they couldn't stir it twice, they quickly changed to another one.

At this time, a craftsman came over and said that the iron could not be stirred.

Li Mengxi wondered why.

The craftsman said that according to the official method, the method of turning pig iron into wrought iron is to pour the pig iron into the pool and stir it more. Stir and stir, the charcoal gas will burn away, and the pig iron will become wrought iron.

Fortunately, Li Mengxi told the blacksmiths all the knowledge about steel forging without keeping it secret. After the blacksmiths became familiar with the relationship between steel, carbon, and gas, the principles of iron smelting were very clear. Otherwise, the craftsmen would not have been able to discover based on experience.

Li Mengxi’s mistakes.

What surprised Li Mengxi was that he originally thought that the iron flowing out of the blast furnace must be pig iron because of its contact with the charcoal fire. He thought that the only way to transform pig iron into wrought iron was to remove the charcoal by forging for hundreds of times.

Therefore, Li Mengxi believed that the cost of producing wrought iron was extremely high.

However, the real situation is that Dahan has the technology to manufacture wrought iron sheets on a large scale. He only needs to flow the pig iron into a shallow iron pool to make the pig iron contact with the air as much as possible, and then stir more and stir, and the charcoal in the iron will

A lot of combustion was done.

In practice, this reaction is that often, the pig iron juice thickens at a very fast speed and cannot be stirred anymore. This is not due to the cooling. It takes most of a day for the temperature of a pool of molten iron to drop to the solidification state.

This is because as the charcoal in the pig iron is burned and removed, it quickly turns into wrought iron. The wrought iron melts much higher, so the molten iron quickly becomes viscous.

The steel-filling method cannot stir the iron, so Li Mengxi was worried. He didn't know whether the charcoal was mixed evenly after boiling the pig iron and wrought iron overnight.

I asked the blacksmith, but he couldn't give any advice.

At this point, Li Mengxi had no choice but to leave it alone.

Next time it seems that I have to make a standard square iron pool, and then insert the wrought iron pieces evenly into it, so that the charcoal can be dispersed as evenly as possible.

The steel has been filled. When checking the quality of the iron, someone picks up a spoonful of iron juice and tries to make it. After the forging is completed, the iron has cooled down, and the completed iron pieces make a clanging sound when knocked. The craftsmen judge one after another.

It's all good molten steel.

There is no problem with the molten steel, and casting will begin immediately.

The blacksmiths poured molten iron into the finely crafted molds that had already been polished. When two ladles of molten iron were poured in, the molds were full.

After half an hour, open the mold and take out the steel bar that is still hot inside. The steel bar is cast with uniform thickness and excellent shape.

After that, the craftsmen immediately started making new molds using the cast steel bars.

With as many as a thousand steel bars, it will take a long time to cast them.
Chapter completed!