Jian Yong opened the linen and looked at the sun carefully, with a surprised look on his face.

Li Mengxi was puzzled. The linen was dull gray with a yellowish color. Where was the white color?

While feeling doubtful, Li Mengxi looked at the craftsmen and saw that they were dirty.

"Come here! Get a new piece of hemp!" he ordered.

When I brought the linen cloth over and compared the two, the difference was immediately apparent.

There are two types of linen. The one we brought is brownish-yellow in color and feels very rough. The texture and gaps in the linen are clearly visible to the naked eye. However, the newly woven linen is very bland in color and has a pure feeling. The new linen has a very pure color.

It feels much more delicate to the touch.

Stretching them together again for comparison, the used linen appears thicker, while the new linen is thinner. It's not right to say it is thin, it seems to be tighter.

The biggest difference between the two linens is the feel. The new linen feels much softer.

"...Xianhe, do you think this piece of linen is superior or inferior?" Li Mengxi pointed at the cloth.

Jian Yong took a look and touched it with his hand, "It's thick, medium to high quality cloth."

In other words, the quality of mid-to-high-quality linen is inferior to that of new linen.

Li Mengxi keenly felt that there was going to be a major innovation in weaving technology, and Julu's linen would be the best in the world!

Unexpectedly, the breakthrough in papermaking technology can be used in weaving cloth. This is really unexpected.

Thinking back to various papermaking technologies, during papermaking, strong alkali boils papermaking materials, bark and wheat straw, etc., which can remove a large amount of pigments.

But when the alkalinity is not strong, the decolorization is not obvious.

Papermaking is just papermaking. Papermaking only requires boiling the materials into lakes, but weaving requires ensuring the basic integrity of the hemp fibers.

I tried it a while ago and used strong alkali to cook hemp, which turned the hemp into pulp and made it unusable.

A dilemma lies at the front. Boiling with strong alkali will decolorize the hemp, but it will turn the hemp into a pot of porridge. Cooking with a medium-strong alkali will cook the hemp just right, but the decolorization effect is not good.

For papermaking, paper quality and paper color are both important. For weaving, cloth quality and color are also important.

[To be honest, I have been using the Huanyuan app recently to read and catch up on updates. It allows me to switch between sources and read aloud with many sounds. .huanyuanapp is available for Android and Apple.]

Pure white linen is better than dark colored linen.

After thinking about it, I came up with a way to balance the quality and color. You can first soak the raw hemp in a strong alkali without heating it, just soak it for a period of time. After all the excess pigments in the hemp are dissolved, you can fish it out.

Cook with weak alkali.

In this way, if the soaking time is long enough, the pigment will be dissolved completely without affecting the fabric.

When making paper, activated carbon is used for decolorization, and activated carbon can also be added to soak raw hemp.

No matter whether it is strong alkali or activated carbon, it is impossible to completely remove all pigments. Therefore, when making paper from wheat straw, after double decolorization by strong alkali and activated carbon, the final paper still has a dull color, which cannot be called

Pure white.

To truly call it pure white paper, white papermaking bark must be used as the raw material for papermaking.

Papermaking has white papermaking bark as raw material, but there is no white material to weave cloth.

If you really want to make completely pure white linen, you can do it. Alcohol can completely remove the pigment. Soaking wheat straw in strong liquor for some time can turn yellow wheat straw into white.

However, considering the cost issue, using expensive spirits to process raw hemp is too expensive and the gain outweighs the loss.

——

Having suddenly made a major technological breakthrough, Li Mengxi used up most of the strong alkali inventory in the past few days and soaked a large amount of sonothena.

Using the "principle of molecular dynamics", if you soak hemp in cold water, the pigment will be removed in one month. If you soak hemp in water at 30 degrees Celsius, the molecular motion will be much more intense, and the pigment will be removed in ten days.

In order to witness the decolorization effect more quickly, Li Mengxi asked people to continue to heat the large vat in which hemp was soaked over low heat. Using low heat would prevent the water from boiling and prevent the hemp from being boiled apart. At the same time, it would greatly improve the decolorization efficiency.

After half a day and one night of simmering on a low fire, when I looked at it the next day, I found that the color of the raw sesame had become much lighter, showing a grayish color with a little yellowish color.

Harvest the hemp, wash it with water, wash it several times, add activated carbon and cook it for a while. After cooking, the color of the raw hemp becomes lighter.

Finally, add an appropriate amount of alkali and cook the sesame over high heat for a while.

After this last step of cooking, the raw hemp fibers are completely dispersed, and nine out of ten of the pigments in the hemp are removed. Use these specially treated raw hemp fibers to twist them into threads and then weave them into cloth. After a day and at dusk, you have

Five feet of linen.

Li Mengxi, Jian Yong and a group of craftsmen inspected the new cloth. The color of the linen cloth was whiter than the one tried yesterday. Although it was not pure white, it could still be called white.

Li Mengxi asked everyone, "Everyone, how much can such a piece of linen be sold for?"

Jian Yong replied, "The market price of linen is about six hundred yuan for a piece of fine linen.

And even the finest linen is far less delicate and tight than our white linen.

I think one horse can be sold for at least 800 yuan."

It is obvious that the quality of white hemp is higher than that of coarse hemp. If it is put on the market, it will have unparalleled competitiveness.

Making white hemp is not troublesome. It just replaces the sinking step with soaking in strong alkali and adds the stewing process. The only troublesome thing in the white hemp production process is the strong alkali.

In order to expand papermaking, there are no less than a few hundred people responsible for making alkali on a daily basis. Weaving will be a larger industry than papermaking, and the number of people making alkali must be expanded to thousands to meet the huge needs.

It just so happened that Julu City gathered all the old, weak, women, and children in Julu County and all those with weak physical strength. They only worried about not having enough jobs and not worrying about consuming manpower.

It is expected that in the entire test plan of the loom, as for the twine, the variables of the twine may include the shape, thickness, braiding method, friction of the twine, etc.

The thickness of the twine may affect the weaving speed and even the strength of the cloth, as well as the shape. Flat threads and round threads may also affect the strength, as well as the weaving method. Is it better to twist two fibers or three or four fibers?

I don’t know whether one’s faculties or even five faculties are good.

As for the friction of twine, this is gained from the experience of papermaking.

In papermaking, some rosin or gum is added to the pulp to improve the waterproof performance. From this, Li Mengxi thought that maybe some additives could be added to the fabric.

The rosin added in papermaking improves the waterproofness of paper. However, this waterproofness does not seem to be of much use to fabrics, but it may also be used. Fabrics that are not easy to absorb water are not easy to rot. Moreover, rosin is very smooth and is suitable for fabrics.

The smoother the fabric, the less friction it will experience and the less likely it will wear.

Therefore, in terms of friction, improving smoothness can effectively increase the life of the fabric.

When it comes to additives, the type and source of the additives becomes a problem. Not much rosin is used in papermaking. Even so, there has been a shortage of rosin.

Compared with papermaking, weaving is on a larger and larger scale. If rosin is used as a fabric additive, the consumption will be too large.

Rosin works, but it doesn't work.

When it comes to friction, Li Mengxi thought of many ways to reduce friction, such as applying oil.

But the problem is that the source of oil is also a problem, oil is too expensive.

So grease won't work either.

By adding additives to the fabric to reduce its friction and improve its durability, [fabric] [additive] [adhesion], after thinking about these words over and over for a long time, Li Mengxi suddenly thought of dyeing and dyeing agents.

There has been a breakthrough in the problem. The question is, which dye makes the fabric the smoothest and strongest.

To solve this problem, we must first know what are the commonly used dyes. We called a craftsman to ask, and the craftsman answered that the dyeing methods include mineral dyeing, wood dyeing, flower dyeing, fruit dyeing, etc., covering all colors.

Most of the things can be used to dye cloth.

It is known that additives, whether dyes, glue or rosin, can additionally change the strength of the fabric. Some additives will cause corrosion to the fabric and reduce its strength. However, some additives can make the fabric stronger, smoother and more durable.

durable.

In today's productivity, beauty is not important, but durability is. Therefore, it is time to find a dye that can increase the strength of the fabric.

There is no dyeing cloth industry in the army now, and the demand is coming, so the dyeing cloth industry can be started.

On May 15, the Dyeing Industry Department was established under the Ministry of Industry.

The first batch of personnel under the Dyeing Industry Department were craftsmen who were found in the army and were good at dyeing cloth. The first task they received was to collect various dyes from everywhere.

It takes a certain amount of time to collect dyes, so Li Mengxi devoted his energy to other aspects.

Regarding twine, there are three other variables: shape, thickness, and weaving method. What shape can twine have? It's just round or flat.

Round thread has low friction, so the fabric is smooth, and round thread is easy to make. Based on this comparison, the shape of the thread must be round. There is no need to go into details about the shape.

Li Mengxi summoned the craftsmen and asked them about various thread twisting methods. The simplest is two strands of thread, and the more complicated ones are three strands or even four strands. Because he did not know the strength of different threads and the spinning speed, Li Mengxi asked the craftsmen to twist the thread.

Various lines are produced.

Then, I used various threads to weave cloth. After comparison, I found that the more thread strands, the stronger the cloth.

Considering the complexity of the spinning thread, we finally selected three strands of thread.

After asking everyone for confirmation, people generally agree that the more threads there are, the thicker and stronger the fabric will be.

It seems that what limits the quality of cloth is the thread.

It is too troublesome to make multiple strands of thread by hand.

From this, Li Mengxi realized that it is no wonder that the textile industry is called the textile industry. It turns out that spinning and weaving are equally important.

There are weaving machines for weaving, but there are no special tools for twisting twine, so the quality and production speed of the cloth are limited.

In order to overcome this problem, Li Mengxi offered a huge reward to the craftsman camp in order to develop spinning equipment as soon as possible.

The last variable related to twine - the impact of twine thickness on textile efficiency, or the impact on the strength of the cloth.
To be continued...