Rise of the 1630s South America

The clay brick kilns on the south bank of the Dayu River are still firing bricks day and night.It's just that the fire bricks are no longer ordinary red bricks, but refractory bricks.In view of the huge demand for refractory bricks in projects such as ironworks and steelworks that will be launched next, the executive committee decided to build a 20-door wheel kiln next to the adobe kiln.

The wheel kiln is a continuous production brick kiln, the flue gas generated during the production process can preheat the bricks ahead.When a 20-door wheel kiln is in production, 4 doors are firing, 7 doors are preheating, 5 doors are cooling, and the remaining 4 doors are already producing bricks.As the flame moves between the kiln doors, continuous production can be achieved, and the efficiency is many times higher than that of small earthen kilns.

For this reason, many projects that require bricks are currently suspended, except for a few that have been specially approved by the Executive Committee, to make way for the construction of wheel kilns.

Since the dam was built on the Dayu River, the utilization of water resources has been put on the agenda.

The first is the hydraulic mill used in cement plants.The structure of this kind of grinding machine is very simple. There is a circular grinding disc below. There is a central axis in the center of the grinding disc. There is a horizontal shaft above the grinding disc. There are rollers at both ends of the horizontal shaft.The lower water wheel drives the central shaft, and then drives the rollers on the horizontal shaft to make sliding friction to grind the raw materials finely.The cement factory has built several hydraulic mills of this type downstream of the embankment, which can grind 2 tons of powder a day and one night, greatly improving labor efficiency.

Next, the Mechanical Design Department under the Industrial Bureau designed an ancient hydraulic forging hammer.After the water wheel is driven by the water flow, the hydraulic forging hammer converts the circular motion of the water wheel into the linear motion of the connecting rod through the crank, lifts the forging hammer from a low place to a high place, and then strikes the forging hammer downwards. The frequency of beating can be adjusted through the gear set.

Braun Beck, a senior carpenter from Holstein, led a group of carpenters across the world to make the whole set of equipment. The water wheel, transmission shaft, eccentric wheel, crank connecting rod, and gear set are all made of hardwood. , As for the forging hammer itself, it is a scrapped old hammer that the vest found from the barge scrap.

Since the hydraulic forging hammer was manufactured, a large number of workers in cement factories and lime factories have been liberated. It is too efficient to crush limestone.However, although this gadget is convenient to use, there are many faults.The most prominent problem is that the material strength of the gear is not enough. The wooden gear is limited by the material, and the driving force is limited. It cannot push the heavy forging hammer to a high place, and it is often easily damaged.Of course, solving this problem is actually very simple, you just need to replace the wooden gears with iron or even steel ones.

When it comes to this issue, I have to mention the vest that is trying to make graphite crucible steelmaking.After automatically having graphite, Vest has been thinking about making a graphite crucible to smelt that boatload of scrap steel.According to the information he found, he listed several common crucible formulas. After careful consideration, he chose a formula for smelting high-carbon steel, in which graphite accounted for 50%~55%, refractory clay accounted for 38%~40%, aggregate Accounting for 5%~15%.

After the formula is selected, the mold is started. The mold is made of wood with two layers inside and outside.Vest is preparing to make a 50# crucible, which can smelt 43 kilograms of iron at a time.After the mold is made, the next step is to add water to mix graphite, refractory clay and aggregate to make mud.Then firstly lay the bottom of the outer mold with mud, then put it into the inner mold, and then fill the gap between the two molds with material and compact it, so that a crucible blank is completed.

After the crucible blank is completed, it needs to be dried with a slow fire, and then sent to the kiln for firing.Ma Jia made a whole five graphite crucibles in one go. After drying, the outer surface was painted with a layer of glaze to prevent oxidation, and then sent to the kiln for firing.

While waiting for the crucible to be fired, Majia and his team of designers of the two knives carefully considered the design of the melting furnace.The planned smelting furnace is made of refractory bricks, with a firepit at the bottom, about the size of which can hold 6-10 crucibles at a time, and uses anthracite to burn and heat.The exhaust gas from combustion enters the grid-shaped regenerator also made of refractory bricks from the flue, heats the refractory bricks in the regenerator to hundreds or even thousands of degrees, and then is discharged from the chimney through the outlet pipe.

In fact, using graphite crucible for steelmaking can completely consider not building a regenerator.Because of the particularity of the graphite crucible, it is easy to make the internal temperature of the crucible exceed the steel melting temperature of 1600 degrees when heated.However, considering the requirement of reducing energy consumption and the open hearth steelmaking project that may be launched in the future, the regenerator was still taken into consideration in the design of the vest.

This design needs to build two regenerators, A and B.One end of the two regenerators is connected to the smelting furnace and is made of thick bricks; the other end is directly connected to the chimney through two pipes A and B.Between the two pipes, another pipe C is built to connect A and B with each other.And the C pipeline is connected with the hydraulic blower again, and a valve is adorned at its joint with the blower, so that it can be manually controlled to blow air to any pipeline.

When the fresh air is blown into the pipeline A by the blower, the air enters the smelting furnace to support combustion, and the high-temperature waste gas generated by the combustion and reaction in the furnace enters the regenerator B, heats the dense grid refractory bricks in the regenerator, and then passes through the pipeline B It is discharged from the chimney; when the temperature of the refractory bricks in the regenerator B is almost heated, switch the valve and start blowing fresh air into the B pipe. Raise the temperature in the furnace, and then the high-temperature waste gas generated enters the regenerator A, heats the refractory bricks, and is discharged from the chimney through the A pipe.In this way, it can be repeated repeatedly, so that the temperature entering the furnace is fully preheated, which greatly increases the temperature of the melting furnace, making it possible to melt molten steel.

Since this project requires a large amount of refractory bricks and ordinary red bricks, Vest lobbied a lot in the executive committee, focusing on describing to the committee members the wonderful picture of steel smelting.Finally, after getting the support of Ma Ganzu, it was finally approved by the executive committee.

The construction team that was under construction at the Lun kiln field newly assigned 30 people, and the executive committee allocated another 60 Swiss immigrants to form a construction team for the steelmaking project. This 90-member team entered the steelmaking workshop the next day Construction.The steelmaking workshop is built on the north bank of Dayu River, which is convenient for utilizing the rich water resources of Dayu River.The factory building is still the original wooden structure thatched shed at present, but the conditions are difficult now, and the resources should be used first where they are most needed. When the shortage of materials is not so severe in the future, then find a way to rebuild it into a reinforced concrete factory building.

At the request of the vest, the blacksmith Pierre from Switzerland first smelted some scrap iron with a simple clay crucible, and began to make various tools urgently needed by the crossing crowd, such as saws, axes, files, arrowheads, farm tools, iron brazing, Spoons, crucible tongs, etc.

Industry is in full swing, and agriculture is also in full swing.

Jin Kela lingered in front of the newly built stables, cowsheds, sheep pens, and pig pens, looking at the livestock with gentle eyes as if looking at his relatives, which made Zheng Bin who was following behind him shudder.It is autumn in South America now, and in just half a year, in October and November, these livestock will enter the estrus period and start breeding offspring.With the superior climate and natural conditions on the grasslands of Uruguay, these livestock populations will grow like a snowball.

This time, the Executive Committee assigned about 20 Swiss immigrants to the newly established Animal Husbandry Bureau. Most of them are women. Their daily work is to help take care of the livestock in the livestock shed, and clean up regularly at the same time.The feces in the livestock barn have to be cleaned every day. One is to maintain hygiene. In addition, the manure itself is also a valuable fertilizer, which is of great use to agricultural production.

"Are the saplings ready? I will organize people to plant them tomorrow." Jin Kela asked casually, "The soil here has high organic matter and is rich in potassium, so you don't even need to apply fertilizer. It's a pity that those Dutch people don't The saplings will be preserved, and the total number of apple, pear, peach, and grape saplings is less than a hundred, which is a pity, a pity indeed."

"Committee Jin, what about those wheat seeds? When will they be planted?" Zheng Bin asked.

"What wheat seeds, bullshit! That Dutchman fooled us, obviously he just bought a bunch of wheat at random, which is not considered as seeds. The wheat that is less than a thousand catties is enough to sow sixty or seventy acres. Forget it Let’s take good care of these wheat fields this year, try to select some high-quality seeds, and expand the planting next year.” Jin Kela sighed, and said: “The green vegetables and leeks planted in the vegetable fields before are almost ready for transplanting. Remember to apply more fertilizer, and when the production comes up and can stably supply the table, our agricultural department will be a hit."

"Okay, I will go there with my classmates to transplant in the afternoon." Zheng Bin said excitedly.Before crossing, he and a total of 60 teachers and students in his class happened to take a group tour on Yunsheng No. [-], and they were extremely lucky or unlucky to cross over.These students are already in the second grade of high school, and most of them are assigned to do some non-heavy physical work such as sanitation and epidemic prevention, fishing, and brick making.A small number are assigned to the agricultural sector, responsible for watering, fertilizing, weeding and other farm work.After several months of training, these students have become much more presentable in their work.

"By the way, those Dutch guys brought some potatoes this time. I checked yesterday and most of them have sprouted. You cut off the sprouted parts with a knife and plant them in the ground, just a few meters to the west. Don’t get me wrong. This is a high-yield plant, and many Europeans in this era are counting on it to survive.” Jin Kela ordered again, “The soybeans can be harvested in more than half a month. Yes, the yield per mu can almost reach fifty or sixty catties."

Compared with the high average yield of 150-200 kilograms per mu of modern soybeans, the yield of this thousand mu of soybeans planted by Chuanzhong is simply weak.However, considering that there are no chemical fertilizers and pesticides in the crossing, and it is the first year of planting, it is already very good to have this kind of yield, which fully shows that the soil is still very fertile.