The army began to build weapons. Li Mengxi collected a lot of inferior iron from the countryside. After collecting the iron materials, he assembled a kiln to refine the pig iron into molten iron with coke, and then poured it into a mold to make a gun head.

Because coke is a sharp tool, the production efficiency of lance heads is extremely high. In one kiln, more than 13,000 lance heads were cast.

After the iron parts cooled down, Li Mengxi picked up some of the finished products for inspection.

No matter how the gun head is cast from pig iron, its shape is regular enough.

In order to be easy to produce and manufacture, the gun head has a sleeve structure. This kind of gun head can be installed directly with a stick, which is much more convenient than the cutting-type gun stem.

It is known that the structure of the casting is loose and not strong enough. Compared with the sword, the spear head is short and does not require high toughness. The attack method of the spear is mainly stabbing, and the stabbing relies more on the hardness.

And because the melting point of pig iron is low, pig iron is often used when casting, and pig iron contains high carbon content, which happens to be strong and weak in hardness. The properties of cast iron and gun heads need to coincide, so the technology of casting weapons can and can only be used in guns.

There is no such thing as forging swords.

The cast iron tip is barely usable, but just barely.

Li Mengxi took several gun tips and knocked them on each other, but he couldn't hear anything.

"Lu Li!" Li Mengxi asked the person next to him, "Bring me a hammer."

Lu Li, the adjutant of the craftsman battalion, quickly came with a hammer. Li Mengxi took the hammer and banged the gun head hard several times. The gun head was successfully smashed.

As you can see, the gun tip is not strong enough.

Li Mengxi touched his chin and thought for a moment. He had to find a way to change it.

The improvement method is to decarbonize.

In armor technology, there is a kind of mass-produced inferior iron armor. Craftsmen cast thick iron armor with pig iron, and then put the iron armor on fire for a while. When the charcoal on the outer layer of the armor is removed, the outer layer becomes

Wrought iron, wrought iron is soft and tough, while the inner layer of pig iron is hard, which makes the armor both hard and tough, and its strength is enhanced.

The problem with this kind of batch casting of armor plates is that because the Han Dynasty has not yet used coke on a large scale, the temperature is not enough, the molten iron cannot be opened, and the fluidity is poor. Once the fluidity of the molten iron is poor, thin armor plates cannot be cast, so only

It can cast relatively thick armor pieces. The problem here is that the cast armor pieces are thick and heavy, and the structure of the armor pieces is loose. Even if the outer layer is decarbonized, making it a soft structure on the outside and hard on the inside, the improvement in defense is still extremely limited.

.Casted armor is not only heavy, but also has poor defense. Apart from being able to be mass-produced in large quantities and having extremely high production efficiency, it has no other advantages.

The technical shortcomings of casting armor are like this, and the same problems also exist in casting weapons. However, there are remedies for weapons.

Li Mengxi ordered someone to light a fire with charcoal, and then hung the head of the gun so that the head of the gun was right on the tip of the flame for heating.

The principle is this, just like a candle, if you insert a wooden stick into the candle and take it out after two seconds, you will find that the part of the candle that is in contact with the outer flame turns black, while the part that is in contact with the inner flame does not.

Traces of burning. This is because the outer flame is fully in contact with oxygen, burning violently, and the temperature is high.

This knowledge is the core principle of decarburization. Decarburization uses charcoal fire. The most important thing is this "charcoal". As we all know, charcoal will not only burn flames, but also contain carbon elements in the flames. That is,

Charcoal fire can both carburize and burn the charcoal to cause decarburization. So, how to control the infiltration and removal of charcoal? The answer lies in the principle of candles.

In the outer flame of the flame, the combustion is extremely complete. If the iron piece is placed in the outer flame, the speed of burning the charcoal is greater than the speed of removing the charcoal, thus causing decarburization.

When burying iron parts in charcoal fire, the charcoal fire is equivalent to the wick of a candle. When burying iron parts in charcoal fire, the speed at which the charcoal burns away is less than the speed at which the charcoal penetrates, causing carburization.

This is the principle. Li Mengxi has already understood the truth, so he ordered the people to hang the tip of the gun at the highest point of the flame and burn it.

One day later, an unknown amount of firewood was consumed, and more than 10,000 gun heads were all decarburized.

Comparing the decarburized pipe head with the pipe head that has not been decarburized, you can see that the pipe head becomes whiter after one day of burning. The color is one of the differences between wrought iron and pig iron.

That is to say, after one day of burning, the iron on the outer layer of the gun tip has been decarbonized.

I picked up the hammer again and smashed the two gun heads again. The comparison was obvious. The pig iron gun head was too brittle and broke as soon as I hit it. However, after several hammerings, the charcoal gun head was flattened and the holster was not damaged.

Broken.

But from this, a new question arises. If it is a piece of armor, after the cast iron armor is decarburized, it becomes soft on the outside and hard on the inside. This does not matter, but the weapon is different. What is the outer layer of the weapon? The blade of the weapon is

Removing carbon from the outer layer does greatly improve the toughness of the cast iron gun head, but it also makes the gun head and gun blade become mature iron and soft.

Li Mengxi drew out the dagger from his waist and slashed lightly with the gun blade. Without using much force, he saw a gap made by the gun blade.

Then he picked up the tip of the gun and stabbed it on the wooden pillar like a dagger. After poking it, he picked it up and saw that the tip of the gun was bald.

Ninety percent of the usefulness of a gun is in the gun tip, but unfortunately, in a gun head, the thinnest and narrowest part is the gun tip. You can imagine how much the hardness of the gun tip will decrease after the carbon is removed.

sharp.

Next, it’s time to use the remedy.

There is a very cost-effective technology - spot steel method.

Point steel refers to using fine steel to strengthen the tip of the gun to increase the lethality of the tip.

The steel spotting technology and the cast iron gun head are a perfect match. The cast iron gun head has extremely high production efficiency, but its toughness is not enough. In order to improve the toughness, it can only be decarburized. Without carbonization, the gun tip will inevitably become soft. The steel spotting technology is easy to operate.

Once the gun tip is strengthened, the inferior cast iron gun head immediately becomes more cost-effective.

Zhang Fei's Zhangba snake spear is also known as Zhangba dotted steel spear. Although Zhang Fei's spear is made of fine steel, Zhang Fei will often find craftsmen to point the spear tip with steel. Otherwise, if there is no such

Xiang Rong ordered steel maintenance, and Zhang Fei's snake spear had long been bald.

Starting to burn steel, this is the job of the blacksmiths. The blacksmiths forge the best forged steel, then take a piece of steel as big as a peanut and hit it on the spear head. After that, it is quenched with fire and the steel is burnt.

The first batch of steel-pointing guns were made. Li Mengxi took people to try them. A soldier sprinted towards the wooden board with a point-steel gun. With a bang, the head of the gun pierced the board and the sharp point emerged behind.

In the sword forging industry, there is a saying that "use good steel on the blade", because using good steel on the blade is the most cost-effective way to use it.

As for guns, good steel is used at the tip of the gun. Steel-pointing is the technology of using good steel at the tip of the gun. A little fine steel as big as a peanut plus a cheap cast iron gun head equals a gun with performance close to that of an all-steel gun.

The first 70% cost-effective long gun.

All the logistics teams of the Julu Army were here at Li Mengxi's place, and the steel-pointing technology was easy to operate and the workload was not large. In one day, the craftsmen changed more than 7,000 gun heads into point-steel gun heads, and then moved the gun barrels to

In the last installation, more than 7,000 point steel guns were produced.
Chapter completed!