Rise of the 1630s South America

Chapter 1747 Big Inspection ([-])

In other words, the use of copper, a metal with a long history, is also very common on the east coast, such as the thin copper plate covering the bottom of the main naval battleship, such as a large number of bronze or brass cannons cast by military factories (but steel cannons are still used as the main body) Main), such as copper pipes, valves, propellers, bolts (for shipbuilding), gears, gaskets, connectors, watch parts, printed copper plates, distillation pots, heat sinks, etc. copper.

Some of these applications use pure copper, and some are copper alloys, such as bronze, brass, and manganese bronze under study.But there is no doubt that copper, a raw material, is now more and more widely used in the east coast, because whether it is industry, agriculture, commerce (required for coinage), military or the daily consumption of the people (copper consumption), it is very important to the people. Copper, the second-largest metal in East Coast hardware manufacturing, generated extremely strong market demand.

And because the east coast does not produce copper in the local area-the Ministry of Geology has spent many years without knowing how much energy it has spent, how many teams it has sent, and how many Indian legends there are copper places, but they have not been able to find copper mines in the local area-so Huaxia The East Coast Republic has always been a big importer of copper, and the import volume has increased day by day in recent years, costing a huge amount of money every year, and this is one of the few metal mines in the Old Continent that can export large quantities to the East Coast.

Copper imported from the east coast generally comes from the following sources.One is a copper block from the ballast bottom of the Dutch East India Company.As early as the outbreak of the Thirty Years War, because of the huge consumer demand brought about by the war, the price of copper produced in Sweden, Hungary, Germany, England and other places soared, and the price even soared five or six times at the peak. It became possible to transport Japanese copper from the Far East back to Europe for sale.At that time, the East India Company placed a large number of copper blocks and copper sheets purchased at low prices from Japan as ballast on the bottom of the ship, and then transported them back to Amsterdam, which once made huge profits.

Later, the copper price in Europe slowly returned to normal due to the end of the war, but the demand of the people on the east coast began to increase day by day, and they were willing to pay a higher price for copper ingots who were very short of copper, so the East India Company continued to use Japanese copper as a Ballast was transported to the east coast for sale, and this business has now become a fixed pattern, an integral part of the foreign trade of the Dutch East India Company.

The second import route is copper mines from the Old World, which are mainly completed by trading stations distributed in the Baltic Sea and the Mediterranean Sea, and the quantity is quite large, not much less than Japanese copper.It's just that the prices of these copper mines fluctuate a lot, and the output also fluctuates from time to time, and there is competition from other buyers, which annoys the East Coast people who are in charge of the acquisition.Otherwise, it will increase the purchase of copper ore from here for the purpose of balancing the old continent's trade.

All the purchased copper ore will basically be transported to the commercial terminal of Dongfang Port, and then transported by train to Tieling Special Steel Plant for smelting and processing.Of course, most of the products produced by Tieling Factory are refined copper ingots, copper plates or copper alloy plates of different sizes. In order to finally process them into various finished products, it is necessary to rely on the many small and large state-owned factories to survive. The efforts of workshops, small businesses and even individual craftsmen - this group of people is undoubtedly huge. According to incomplete statistics, currently relying on Tieling Special Steel, Western Rolling Steel, Tieling Boiler, First Heavy Machinery and other factories as supporting small workshops have already There are more than 100 employees, and the number of employees has reached thousands. They produce a large number of various hardware products every day. In addition to meeting the needs of the domestic market, they can also export a large amount of profits abroad. This shows the strength of the East Coast hardware industry. potential, and this is only one production area. There are many such processing enterprises in other places, but they are scattered and the scale is not so large.

"Copper exists in the form of sulfide in nature. For example, we recently imported a batch of copper ore from England (produced in Ireland, Cornwall, etc.), mainly chalcopyrite ore. This kind of ore is more common , is also very easy to smelt, both for us and the copper manufacturers in the old continent." The director of Tieling Special Steel Works introduced: "But the biggest difference between us and our counterparts in the old continent is actually the smelting Different ways, this started more than ten years ago, which was also the era of explosive growth in my country's copper demand."

"Our smelting method, simply put, is to roast about several tons of ore first to remove some impurities and crystal water that can be decomposed at high temperature. In the second step, we will roast the cooled raw materials (generally Brown-black) put into the smelting furnace—this is generally a reverberatory furnace—for melting, and the waste slag is continuously removed in the process, and finally a metal liquid with a copper content of more than 35% is formed. And when the smelting furnace contains When the copper metal liquid is almost full, let it flow into a side tank to cool it down. During this process, the metal liquid will condense into large pieces of granular solids. In the smelting system of the Old World, these steps are actually similar to ours, but They lack a qualified reverberatory furnace design, and the life of the refractory bricks is not very satisfactory, so some more complicated smelting processes are needed to make up for it, and the effect is not necessarily good."

"The granular intermediate products condensed in water will be collected and put into another heating furnace—the same design as a reverberatory furnace, but it is more similar to our brick and tile wheel kiln—for high-temperature calcination , at least one day and one night. In the process of calcination, the blower is essential, because it can make the temperature of the furnace reach the highest, which is conducive to the smelting of metal. So far, the impurities in the granular copper are further reduced, and then enter another smelting Melting is carried out in the furnace to form a metal liquid containing about 75% copper."

"This 75% copper liquid will be introduced into the mold again to solidify, and then sent to the third smelting furnace for melting. At this time, the blower will be added to the maximum, so that the impurities in the copper liquid will continue to oxidize and form copper. 95% copper nuggets. These copper nuggets are still not our final products, and we still need to carry out the final step of refining them. Turn into slag or exhaust gas through chemical reaction - the slag produced in this process is also extremely valuable and can be added to the previous step for melting to improve utilization - then the rest is the so-called refined copper, containing copper The copper content is generally more than 99%, and some particularly high-quality ones can achieve a copper content of not less than 99.5%.

"In the subsequent smelting process, Europeans or Asians cannot reach our extremely high temperature, and at the same time, they are not very clear about some chemical reactions in molten copper. In addition, the refining process is often flawed or simply omitted. This makes the copper content of their so-called copper ingots or copper blocks not high, which is far inferior to our products, and the performance is naturally much worse. We are now basically combining the copper ore purchased from Europe with the East India Company Imported Japanese copper nuggets are smelted together, and finally refined copper is produced. Of course, Japanese copper nuggets often give us some surprises, because they may contain gold, and the Japanese do not realize the huge benefits in it, so they subsidize our company in disguise. Ha ha." The director of Tieling Special Steel Plant finally said.

"Most of the refined copper produced by our factory is used to produce various copper alloys (except for the thin copper plates allocated to the Nanzhu Xuefeng Lakeside Electric Institute and the Navy's cladding of the bottom of the ship), and the largest output is undoubtedly the copper alloy. Copper is now, and it is also the most in demand in the market. You see, it is as small as a soldier's button, cap badge (brass pentagram), objects such as candlesticks, incense burners, gongs, coffee pots, etc., as large as brass cannons (Navy Trial-manufactured some giant heavy guns with a large ratio of diameter to diameter and placed them in several important ports. Such super-long-barrel cannons can only be made of copper for the time being), brass sheets that cover the bottom of large-scale sailing ships (the ratio of copper to zinc is 3 :2, this kind of brass sheet corrodes quickly and must be replaced frequently).

"It's really a huge industry, with an annual turnover of hundreds of thousands, right?" After listening for a long time, Qi Wangping nodded and said with a smile: "The hardware industry such as metallurgy, materials, and metal processing is a national industry. The foundation of industry is also the foundation of the national economy. Regardless of how prosperous and prosperous the enterprises that export machinery and equipment, weapons and ammunition, and metal utensils are, in fact, the foundation of their existence is entirely because of your existence. Without you, they would not be able to earn so much Money, the cost of our industry will be as high as that of the old continent, and our citizens can’t enjoy such a high quality of life, so don’t be humble, you are the big brother of the national economy, the tradition of gold, silver, copper, iron, and tin The production of hardware has given us China East Coast Republic a pair of strong bones, it's amazing, let's keep working hard."

"Our annual turnover of selling refined copper and various copper alloys has indeed exceeded 30 yuan. Last year's sales figure was 32 yuan, which was also due to frequent wars and a sharp rise in copper prices. Seven or eight years ago, we still earned Of course, the demand for copper is getting bigger and bigger now. Even if the war ends in the future, this number should not shrink, and it should rise slowly. I am very confident about this. Another point is, The profit margins of copper and copper alloys are relatively large, although the prices have been suppressed a lot (speaking of which, the factory manager couldn’t help complaining about downstream manufacturers, because they buy refined copper or copper alloys at very low prices), But it still makes us feel very impressive, and we plan to continue to develop more copper alloys and make our own contribution to the country's materials science." The director of the Tieling factory said again.

"I heard that in addition to manganese and copper, you also have a large-scale production of lead, tin, zinc, and nickel? Good guy, the products are very complicated. I think it's time to set up a company specializing in the production of non-ferrous metals." It’s not easy for you to manage the company.” Qi Wangping said with a smile, but the director of the Tieling factory on the opposite side thumped in his heart, wondering whether the establishment of this non-ferrous metal company was just casually mentioned by Chairman Qi or the central government. There is a plan. If it is the latter, it will definitely be bad news for Tieling Factory, which has invested a lot of money in the research and development of the above-mentioned metals!

In fact, the director of the Tieling factory was right.Long before Qi Wangping left for Tieling County, the Ministry of Industry and Commerce had submitted a report to the Government Council, intending to set up a metal smelting company, the East Bank Nonferrous Metals Company, in the conveniently accessible Shangcheng Port.In the future, this company will use imported copper, lead, tin, zinc, and nickel ores for smelting, and then produce various alloy materials, laying a solid foundation for the industrial development of the Eastern China Republic.

Among these metals, copper, lead, and zinc are almost all imported from the old continent, mainly from Sweden, England, Turkey, Poland (purchasing agent) and northern Germany; more than 90% of tin comes from the next door, the Spanish Kingdom of Charcas. , transported to the east bank by land and the Paraná River; nickel is a special metal, since the people on the east bank accidentally imported a part from the old continent and studied its chemical properties, it was found by the expedition team in a place in the South Pacific. Many mines have been discovered on the Big Island (that is, the New Caledonia Island in later generations), and it is currently planned to send people to the island to build colonies and docks, prepare for small-scale trial mining of nickel ore on the island, and then transport them back to the east coast for smelting , Processing.

"Well, Chairman Qi, I think this is pretty good now. In fact, our current popular products are only brass, bronze, tin-plated sheet (tinplate) and so on. The nickel-copper alloy is only a trial production of a batch of coins. (cent coins), it’s not yet time to set up a special organization to manage and operate them.” The manager of the Tieling factory said with a smile: “And we are now investing a lot of money in researching the ratio of various alloys, and in researching the refining of gold and silver. It can be said that more than half of the profit of the factory is invested in it, you can’t just let others pick the ready-made peaches, or the people in the factory will scold me to death.”

"What do you call other people to pick peaches? It's so ugly. They are all national industries. The Ministry of Industry and Commerce is your major shareholder (Dongan Company holds another 20% of the shares). Do you need to approve what the major shareholder wants to do? "Qi Wangping tapped the director of the factory lightly, and then maybe felt that the words were a bit too heavy, so he eased his tone a little, and said: "Of course, it is still a bit far away now, and the central government has not yet decided when to set up a non-ferrous metal industry. The company. Even if it is established one day in the future, don’t worry, your factory will be compensated to a certain extent, and you will not be allowed to do it for nothing.”

"There is another point. How is the ferrochromium alloy that you were looking for and researched before? I heard that you have found some finished products. Did you get them from South Africa?" Qi Wangping asked suddenly.

"I got some, but not too much. It was mainly found by an expedition team jointly sent by the Ministry of War and the Ministry of Geology in the inland of eastern South Africa. It also took a long time and a lot of money. It's just that At present, that area is still controlled by the natives, and we can't send people to establish a stable mining base, so the progress is not very big. And there is not much demand for this kind of thing, and it seems that there is no need for this kind of thing in mechanical processing For this kind of metal, the existing manganese steel cutter head is completely sufficient, and our machinery does not seem to have such high requirements for machining accuracy." The factory manager said.

"This still needs to be followed up quickly. We can't be careless about laying the foundation for our future machinery processing industry and metal material industry." Chairman Qi Da said with a rare seriousness: "As for the mining obstacles facing South Africa, I'll find a way to coordinate with the War Department, things like chromite—we've got to do it."

(End of this chapter)