There are countless species of all the plants in Julu. Even if you only get a small bundle of each plant, the total number will be enough to be terrifying.

In the huge Julu City, plants and trees hung to dry were hung in a complete circle around the city wall, and the battlements were full of them.

After several days, the grass and trees were dried until they were semi-dry, and a large number of clay utensils were fired at the kiln. Among the more than 3,000 large pottery urns fired at the kiln, more than 200 of them were carefully selected, and the finished products varied in size.

Among them, the two hundred selected were of similar sizes, and [Large Industry Technique] perfectly solved the error problem.

The blacksmith camp spent one day making molds, another day casting three hundred iron pipes, and on the third day eight hundred were cast.

The supporting tools, five hundred flat wooden boards for spreading paper, five hundred nets made of cloth of the same size are also ready, and five hundred nets of the same length, thickness, and shape are made of the same wood.

Exquisite scraper.

At this time, everything was ready except for the grass and trees. The grass and trees had been exposed to the sun for three days and were only half dry, and most of them were still green.

The principle of papermaking is to utilize plant fibers from plants. Plant fibers exist in hay and also in wet vegetation.

If the material is not dried in the sun, it will have a certain impact on papermaking, but paper can still be made.

Li Mengxi didn't want to wait too long. After careful consideration, he decided to start testing immediately.

The first step in material processing is to chop up all the materials, whether they are bark, grass or vines.

Over the past few days, seventy-five species of bark, 289 species of herbs, 36 species of vines, and 52 species of flowers and plants were collected.

In total, there are more than 400 types of plant and tree materials.

In order to process these materials, Li Mengxi collected many baskets. He had people chop the plant materials into pieces and store them together separately.

Li Mengxi clearly knows that the crushing of materials will produce huge errors. Materials such as bark are too hard and plants such as herbs are too soft. This results in various materials of different sizes and lengths when crushed with a guillotine.

together.

[To be honest, I have been using Yeguoyuedu to read and catch up on books recently. I can switch sources and read aloud with many sounds. Yeguoyuedu is available for Android and Apple.]

Fiber is the base material of paper, and the length of the fiber greatly affects the quality of the paper.

Although I knew this, I had no choice. If there was a mechanical grinder, all kinds of materials could be crushed into pieces of exactly the same size. But there is no grinder, only a guillotine, so the differences are inevitable.

After half a day, the materials were processed, and 482 baskets of 482 types of plants were packed.

Such a large number needs to be tested at the same time, which takes up a huge amount of space.

Houses were being built everywhere in the city, and there was no space spacious enough, so we had to find an open space outside the city. In the open space outside the city, measure the distance, draw a good location, put a large urn in one location, put a basket of materials, and put a pile of

A little firewood, and a person to light the fire.

Hundreds of large urns are neatly stacked, which looks spectacular from a distance.

After all the large urns were placed, the centurions went down with scales, weighed ten kilograms of each kind of grass and wood scraps and poured them into the urns. Followed by the water wheel, the large urns were filled with materials, and a bucket of water was poured into each urn.

.

Behind them is the person responsible for dispensing the medicine.

The medicine is alkali powder boiled from a solution of plant ash. The centurion who is responsible for distributing the alkali powder holds a small bamboo tube and a small spoon in his hand. Every time he goes to a location, the centurion uses the small spoon to fill a full tube of alkali powder.

powder, and then pour it all into a big vat.

With this method, the same amount of base is placed everywhere.

After a long time, all the materials, water, and medicines were distributed. After giving an order, the people lit a fire and began to cook the pulp.

In the papermaking process, the degree of cooking of the pulp also affects the quality of the paper. If the cooking time is longer and the fibers are fully dispersed, the quality of the pulp will be better, and the quality of the paper will be better.

This is another point that is difficult to control uniformly.

When firewood is burning, there will be more or less firewood, the firewood will be wet or dry, the firewood will be closer or farther away, the wind will be strong or weak, all of which will affect the firepower and thus the cooking effect.

If there is an induction cooker or a gas stove, the firepower is easy to control, but now, with only firewood, the heat is difficult to control. Therefore, hundreds of people can only work at the same time, starting and stopping cooking at the same time to minimize errors.

As to whether there was a way to accurately control firepower at the end of the Han Dynasty, the answer is yes.

The root cause of the difficulty in controlling firepower is that the quality of firewood is difficult to control. Since the quality of firewood is difficult to control, there is no need to use firewood. You can use an alcohol lamp.

Li Mengxi knew clearly that if he made ten alcohol lamps of the same size, used wicks of the same thickness, and used alcohol of the same intensity, then he would immediately have ten heat sources with the same firepower.

However, alcohol is too expensive. Using it as a heat source or making paper is a waste of money.

Li Mengxi patrolled around, boiling various kinds of chopped grass and herbs in large urns. From the appearance, it was no longer possible to distinguish the original types of the chopped pieces. In the large baskets behind the peasants, each of them was boiled.

There is a piece of paper with a clear name written on it in each basket, so there is no possibility of confusion.

The process of cooking pulp is bound to be long. Hundreds of people cooked it all day outside the city. In the evening, Li Mengxi discovered that the pulp was not yet cooked. The uncooked pulp was mostly bark, which has tough bark.

It does not fall apart after being cooked.

I have no choice but to continue cooking.

At night, after night, until dawn the next day, after cooking day and night, the pulp is finally cooked.

Because the plant and wood materials are cooked directly before they are completely dried, many pulps become a little green when cooked.

Then, the paper pulp was filtered several times with linen cloth to remove solid impurities, and then activated carbon was used to adsorb and remove the pigment. After these two steps, the appearance of the paper pulp was greatly changed, becoming much clearer and cleaner.

The most important step has arrived. From these hundreds of pulp samples, hundreds of paper samples need to be produced, and there can be no slight mistakes.

Li Mengxi and the centurion were patrolling around. The hundreds of civilian workers in the audience followed the instructions and first made a few pieces of paper hastily. The first few sheets of paper were discarded. Then, when they officially started making paper, the civilian workers pressed

He asked, holding an iron pipe full of paper pulp and pouring it on the copy net. All the peasants had a palm-sized scraper in their hands. They took the scraper and carefully spread the paper on the copy net.

flat.

This step requires extreme precision and detail. Once someone does it improperly, the centurions who are watching closely will immediately stop it.

The purpose of this test is to find the best quality materials from hundreds of plant and wood materials. Because of the large number of samples, the amount of comparative testing is extremely large, and along with it, the testing consumption is greatly increased.

This requires that for each sample, hundreds of sheets of paper need to be made to be enough for testing.
Chapter completed!