Chapter 131 Smelting
【What the hell? ! 】
Muttering a curse word silently in his heart, Zhou Xu walked over and picked up the stone that shone with metallic luster in the sun at an obviously accelerated pace.
【There is no mistake, this should be metal ore! 】
Zhou Xu really didn’t expect that there would be a mineral vein next door to his initial camp!
But think about it, they were busy solving the problem of food and clothing every day. In this era when there are no testing methods, who has nothing to do to dig rocks?
Now this digging actually allowed him to dig out a treasure!
While signaling the quarrying team to increase intensity and continue mining, Zhou Xu asked people to find two empty backpacks and asked Zhang Xiaoshan and Li Shitou, who were the followers, to carry them, and then they were there Ore was found in the quarry.
After this search, the number is really quite a lot.
The members of the quarrying team have dug out a lot of metal ore without knowing it
At this moment, they are all piled in one place, waiting for the transportation team to arrive.
After all, in their eyes, a stone is a stone, nothing special.
Zhou Xu was pretty lucky. After a lot of effort, he filled the two baskets directly. After that, he told Zhou Chongshan and Li Ce and rushed back to Heilongjiang in advance. Moon camp.
He doesn’t know much about various metal ores, but after all, he is a player who likes to play civilization development games. Mining and forging are inevitable in such games.
So he still knows some superficial knowledge.
For example, he can now use high temperatures to refine metal ores and remove impurities.
This is not a difficult task for Zhou Xu, who has coal ores and a kiln.
Even speaking of it, the coal ore he discovered earlier can finally be put to some important use. Before, it was basically used to make fires and cook meals.
Of course, before starting to refine, he first asked people to crush all the metal ores brought back.
This method does not come from any professional knowledge, but from his common sense in life, that is, things with small particles are easier to burn.
The tribe members who received the order quickly got busy.
Zhou Xu himself is not idle either. Although the kilns in their tribe have always been used for firing pottery, as long as the temperature is high enough, there is no problem in refining metal ores.
At this moment, Zhou Xu was already busy lighting up the kiln and starting to raise the temperature.
If you want to refine metal ore, you can't just light a fire. This requires sufficient temperature.
And this temperature takes time to change.
In addition, he also needs to find a suitable container for these ores.
The most suitable one right now is probably pottery...
After all, their pottery itself is fired at high temperatures in this kiln, which also proves its high temperature resistance. characteristics.
While making these preparations, Zhou Xu also called a member of the equipment department over and asked him to make a mold for him out of clay.
Although at this moment, he still couldn't determine what kind of metal the discovered metal ore was, but Zhou Xu was accustomed to taking one step at a time and looking at ten steps.
On the premise that he could successfully extract useful metal and start casting metal tools, Zhou Xu had just been thinking for a while about how to cast this metal tool.
Before traveling through time, some of the cooking videos he watched in his spare time contained relevant content in a small part. So Zhou Xu sorted out his thoughts and came up with the following two methods...
The first method is the more typical forging method, which is what he used in the video The most common method is to first refine the metal and make a metal ingot, then burn the metal ingot until it becomes soft, and then hammer it hammer by hammer to beat the metal ingot into the shape you want.
This method is time-consuming and labor-intensive, but the metal utensils created through repeated tempering are definitely stronger.
As for the second method, it is a lazy one. That is to make a mold first, burn the metal into liquid, then pour the liquid metal into the mold, wait for it to cool and form, and finally polish it a little. It's finished.
Compared with the first method, the strength and quality of the second method are likely to be worse, but it is more realistic.
People like them who want to arm large armies attach great importance to whether this thing can be mass-produced and the efficiency of mass production.
For example, take the combination bow that Zhuang Mengdie made like a show off before. Isn’t that good?
Of course that's good. Considering the background of the times, Zhou Xu couldn't find any fault at all. It can even be said that he performed beyond the standard.
But this thing cannot be mass-produced. It is too difficult and time-consuming to make manually.
On the contrary, the performance of an ordinary bamboo bow glued with adhesive is definitely inferior to that of a combined bow in all aspects, but what Zhou Xu wants is trouble-free and high efficiency!
This is a weapon that can be used to arm troops, and Zhuang Mengdie's combination bow is mostly used to arm his fierce generals.
At this moment, Zhou Xu, who asked members of the equipment department to dig molds, naturally planned to use the second method.
As for what was dug in this first mold?
It is actually a hammer...
If you want to carry out forging work, there is definitely one tool that is indispensable, and that is the forging hammer.
So Zhou Xu had already thought about making the tribe’s first metal vessel a hammer.
The shape of the hammer itself is not complicated, and the members of this equipment department are specially responsible for kneading pottery. Now they are following Zhou Xu's instructions and can do it very neatly, and they quickly made a mold. Decent mold comes.
In this midsummer weather, the mold dries quickly. When the mold is completely dry, the tribe members on the other side have almost finished processing the ore.
"Chief, according to your wishes, we have smashed all those stones."
While speaking, a tribe member held a pottery basin and ran to Zhou Xu. , filled with ore that had been smashed.
Zhou Xu glanced at the gravel, nodded with satisfaction, and then simply used the pottery basin as a container, placed it in the kiln that had already heated up, and began to refine it.
The refining process, to put it bluntly, is to close the furnace and wait. When the temperature is reached, the ore is burned into a liquid state, and the impurities in it are naturally extracted.
However, it took a long time to wait. After two confirmations, the metal ore in the kiln had been burned into liquid.
Without time to think about it, Zhou Xu quickly called someone over, used wooden sticks to carefully lift out the basin, and then poured the liquid inside into the mold.
During this process, thick smoke continued to emit from the mold, but Zhou Xu did not care and asked the tribe members to continue pouring it in. Since he had no experience in this area, he simply poured it into the mold. Until the metallic liquid comes out of the hole.
I’m back to coding, thank you all for your blessings, and also thank my book friends ‘Shadowhunting Eve’, ‘Book Friends 02190430092131046’, ‘Galaxy Wasteland’, ‘The name comes from’, ‘I want to Reward for drinking coke!
(End of this chapter)