With the help of the tribesmen, a large amount of sand was sprinkled on the burning charcoal storage room, and the terrifying smoke finally stopped spewing out.
Part of the collapsed remains of the furnace were cleared, and the solidified pig iron was collected on a large scale.
Clavason fulfilled his promise and paid the two silver coins agreed upon to the workers who helped with the smelting.
So far, the situation has turned around.
However, the messy wreckage has not been completely cleared, and the storage room in ruins still exudes a burning atmosphere.
In the evening, at Klavasen’s house, the family sat together with mixed emotions. In front of them, they were doing Rurik.
Everyone sat on the wooden floor and discussed what to do next.
The oil lamp was lit pinkly, adding an important light to the dark room. The firelight shone on Rurik's young face. For the Klavasen family, their desire to make a big stove really had to rely on Rurik's help.
Some die-cast glass square plates held a bit of dried fish and a small bowl of oatmeal.
The blacksmith's stock of oats is almost gone, and the last bit of skill he has left is planned to be used by Lilia to replenish her health after giving birth. Now in order to get Rurik's help, Klavasen had no choice but to offer his own gift.
Rurik didn’t take it seriously.
The fact that the stove collapsed was so bad that at first, the Clavarsons had nothing to say sitting here.
"What? You're not talking anymore?" Rurik asked deliberately with a dull face.
"This...what can I say?" Klavasen said with an old face full of beards, "I can only ask you to think of something. I hope we can still make new ones. Big stove."
Rurik smiled calmly, holding a nearly hemispherical glass bowl in his hands and taking a sip of wheat porridge: "I thought your family had run out of oats, at least in my family. It's exhausted."
Kawei smiled reluctantly: "The little left is for Lilia, but..."
"I understand" Rurik put it down. Bowl, "Why are you so careful? I said it during the day. Now let's have a meeting and I will tell you what to do next."
"What to do?!" Klavasen and his son They stretched their heads and shouted in unison.
"Are you anxious? It doesn't matter."
"Alas." Klavasen patted his head, "I have seen the largest furnace in my life, and I have also seen the collapse of the furnace. In fact, I want to know more about how it collapsed. And of course, how the special iron you mentioned, smeltiron, was produced."
"Huh? You two senior blacksmiths still can't understand it. "?" Rurik shrugged, feeling that their confusion was ridiculous.
"If I could understand it, I wouldn't let the stove collapse. Please tell me." Klavason raised his head, looking like he was asking for advice humbly. Seeing this, Kawei also lowered his head.
QiThe atmosphere became a bit strange.
Rurik smiled and said: "Normally when you smelt ore, the sponge iron and slag will only press the bottom of the furnace, and the bottom of the furnace is the hard earth! But now the situation has completely changed. "Yes, you threw too much ore into the furnace, hoping to complete a month's worth of sponge iron in just one smelting. Your ambitions are too great."
Clavason suddenly realized: "Ah! Shouldn't we have put in so much ore? Oh, it's our fault."
"It's not just that." Rurik shook his head vigorously, "You have done great things, your furnace is the first time. Melt the ore completely, but your furnace can melt the ore, but it cannot hold it well. The iron turned into water is very heavy, much heavier than the slag! That is the smeltiron, which is very heavy at the bottom of your furnace. The wall is still too thin, and it was completely broken by it."
Let the two blacksmiths and the blacksmith apprentices like Kamnier listen against the wooden wall, hoping that they will have an abstract understanding of mechanics in a short time. The concept may be a bit simple.
They do need to spend some time to understand the "classical mechanics" discovered and summarized by Sir Isaac Newton, but this does not mean that they have not realized many truths in their complicated daily production work. For example, the Clavarsons have their own experience summarizing concepts such as pressure.
Clavason suddenly raised his head: "Oh! Then increase the thickness of the furnace wall."
"And don't put too much ore next time." Kawei added.
"Huh? That's what you think?"
"Otherwise?" Klavasen asked.
"No." Rurik looked like he understood everything. He raised his chin and kept tapping the wooden floor with his fingers: "My friends, since you can completely smelt iron ore, Just like smelting bronze, everything has changed."
"Oh, then put in a large clay crucible." Kawei suddenly realized that he had found a way to take out the molten iron. .
Rurik slapped his little face hard with both hands. He didn't know whether to praise Kawei for his linear thinking or to judge him for being pedantic.
"Don't think about the crucible! Just listen to me. We will work together to build a brand new furnace, but the internal structure will be unprecedented. You must make it according to my orders to still succeed. ”
Klavason and his son looked at each other, and they had no objection.
Taking the opportunity, Rurik immediately taught knowledge about blast furnaces to all the blacksmiths and apprentices present.
As for how Rurik knows this knowledge, he knows it quite well. This is the advanced theoretical knowledge he possesses as a time traveler. Thanks to old blacksmiths like Klavasen, Rurik Rick believes that the father and son can continue to turn their theories into reality.
Here, Rurik also had to lament the Eastern ancestors’ persistence in smelting.
AlsoPerhaps, the ancestors of the East accidentally used copper ore in the process of making pottery. In the thousands of years of pottery making history, the mixed use of copper ore, tin ore and even lead ore enabled them to develop their own bronze smelting technology. .
In order to cast larger bronze vessels, a larger furnace must be used to smelt more bronze water. Increasing demand has forced continuous improvements in furnaces.
The furnaces are getting bigger and bigger. In order to facilitate the collection of bronze water and the disposal of slag waste, special discharge ports and slag discharge ports are set up.
In order to make the combustion more complete, high-quality charcoal was used, coupled with a large animal-powered blower to inject more fresh air into the furnace.
Compared with the skin bags owned by the Russians, the East has already used more advanced bellows and wooden fans, and their blowing efficiency is amazing.
As more air enters the furnace, even charcoal can reach its calorific value limit. As a result, in the era of bronze smelting, Chu people could already reach the extreme high temperature of 1400°C. It is entirely due to the problem of ore selection that the Chu army's weapons contain a large amount of copper and iron alloys.
Smelting technology has reached an extreme height, and the urgent consumption of ordnance for the war has forced the East to have a huge demand for further improvements in iron smelting technology.
However, the Ross tribe does not have a particularly huge need for war now, but the threat of war always comes to them. In a challenging era surrounded by powerful enemies and ambiguous allies, Rurik longed for a relatively peaceful development opportunity. However, the successive slaps in the face made him see a bloody reality - weakness is sin. .
Except for some twenty-year-old young men in the tribe who are eager to make a fortune through robbery under the banner of revenge, Otto and Rurik's attitudes have been inclined to open up wasteland to obtain new living space and produce their own supplies, especially grains like oats and rye.
Now that a vigorous production movement has begun in many new settlements under Ross, there is a huge demand for a large number of metal tools and weapons.
However, only five families in the Ross tribe are professional blacksmiths, and the young blacksmiths are still a group of apprentices under the age of ten. It is still unknown when the men of the Steel Squirrel tribe will acquire excellent blacksmithing skills.
It is at this time of crisis that the Ross tribe is quite weak.
So even if the Klavasen family did not take the lead in making a new furnace, Rurik would have to build a blast furnace. After all, compared to burning ore to make sponge iron, it is far less efficient than directly casting pig iron to make tools. . Although the quality of pig iron tools and weapons is extremely worrying, it all depends on who you compare with. Since the opponent is usually wrapped in cowhide, and only the elite wear chain mail, to deal with this kind of enemy, it is not a big deal to use a spearhead made of pig iron, which is thicker and heavier. As for using it to cast it into bones, gourds or war hammers, and crushing the enemy's bones with blunt objects, that would be no problem.
So for the new stove mentioned by Rurik, its top priority is naturally to be thicker.hearth wall!
In order to make the furnace higher and stronger, of course it needs to continue to be piled with clay and fired into a giant pottery. Its interior is preferably built with a fire-resistant layer of high-temperature-resistant chromite ore from Elon Orava Fort. Perhaps even after doing this, the furnace's ability to withstand pressure was still weak, so Rurik hoped that after the furnace was built, he would continue to pile sand and soil on the outside of the furnace, and finally pound it with a sledgehammer to form a solid mound in order to make the furnace stronger. Not collapse.
The structure of an earthen blast furnace is not complicated.
Since the furnace is designed to deal with the separation of molten iron and slag, the density of the two substances is very different, so it is not difficult to install the slag outlet and the discharge outlet at different locations. .
The so-called difficulty probably lies in the blower.
Since the Klavason family’s four leather bag blowers are almost continuously blowing by a group of strong men with big muscles and round waists, it seems that it is not a problem to promote the complete combustion of charcoal.
But wait! This blowing method itself is difficult to replicate, because it is impossible to always hire people as strong as bulls as labor.
So at this meeting, Rurik focused on two very important construction plans.
There was no paper to draw the design, so Klavasen provided a wooden board, and Rurik used the tip of a carving knife to draw the basic structural diagram of an earthen blast furnace on the wooden board. Because they also had a lot of experience in making utensils according to Rurik's drawings, Kravassin and Kawei's abstract understanding ability has greatly improved. They understood the blueprint of the blast furnace and couldn't help but applaud.
However, there was only one other design drawing. The two senior blacksmiths looked at it carefully with oil lamps, and they were still a little confused.
"What is this? I can't understand." Even the young Kawei was completely confused when faced with the "centrifugal blower" Rurik took out.
"This is a special blower. Although it is made of wood and belts, your carpentry skills are very outstanding. I believe that if you follow the drawings, you will be able to make it."
In fact, the essential difference between the wooden "centrifugal blower" created by Rurik and similar products thousands of years later is probably only the difference in materials. Its essence is a turbocharging system. As long as its sealing is good, its performance is better than that of a bellows blower. However, its production requires mechanical knowledge.
Because its production is more complicated, the East is more willing to use cheap air boxes and exhaust fans, which are one-piece and one-piece blowers.
Although the centrifugal blower like the fan car is also used in smelting, its appearance is too rare. It is more of a simplified version used to shell rice and wheat.
The two people looked at each other with solemn expressions. Rurik deliberately provoked him with words: "If you can't do it, I will have to hire a better carpenter."
"Then let Let me do it!" Clavarson gritted his teeth and sat upright, then gave some instructions to his son Kawei.Order: "Tomorrow we will start taking action. You take the children and hire a group of people to make the stove. And I, I will also hire a group of carpenters to work together to make Rurik's blower."
Rurik was a little stunned: "Huh? Have you decided to hire someone?"
"Why not?" Klavason opened his eyes in surprise.
"Oh! It's not surprising, it's just...it's nothing. Just do as I say."
A meeting was over, and Rurik returned to his home. High spirits.
He was imagining a wonderful scene, while his family members were discussing the thrilling things that happened during the day.
Seeing his son return, Niya directly held his hand and asked about the situation of the blacksmith's family.
"Are you worried about them? Mom."
"Of course! They should be fine." Niya was a little confused by her son's disapproving expression, "Are they really fine?"
"They are all safe. The fire is out and the stove will be rebuilt tomorrow."
"Oh, I hope the stove doesn't collapse again, it's so scary."
" p>
"That won't happen." After saying that, Rurik called all the women in the family to his side, especially Sister Carlotta.
"Not all the people in Ostara have moved to New Roseburg now. They must have settled down. I think they are not willing to move again."
The words are for Ka. Lotta heard this, and as the leader of Ostara, she nodded: "You are right, although we agreed last year that we would all move out today. I am here, and of course everyone does not want to leave."
"Hehe, you are their leader after all. But you are good at grazing, and you need a warmer place to graze cattle and sheep. Roseburg is not very suitable."
Carlotta was surprised, she was weak Rurik muttered: "Rurik, I am obviously your woman, are you asking me to leave...leave."
"Huh?" Rurik hurriedly denied: "I just said you Sooner or later, the tribe will leave Roseburg. This place is too barren, and I am afraid that I will have to leave this fjord in the future. New Roseburg is warmer, suitable for grazing and planting, and the waters there are also suitable for fishing. Our destiny is to leave this place. Fjord, so we need more tools."
The private family said some nonsense, Rurik clapped his hands hurriedly: "You just saw the furnace collapsed, but you didn't know the Klavasen family. The iron ore has been completely smelted into molten iron!”
Although Rurik’s words were a bit exaggerated, this rhetoric completely exceeded the understanding of the female family members. It’s not like the Carlotta sisters have never seen iron smelting before. Rumia and Saipolava are the only two girls here who accidentally understand the principles of iron smelting.
“If the ore turns into water, can it be cast?!” Carlotta asked in surprise.
"Yes, you are so smart."
Carlotta smiled shyly, and in just a moment, she finally understood all Rurik's hints.
"Ah! We cast farm tools and use the iron ore that is everywhere to cast tools. Can each of us Ostarians have our own axe, shovel and draft?"
"Yes." Rurik smiled and said: "It's time to arrange for your tribe to open up wasteland. They will bring a full set of tools. By the way, there will also be heavy plows. At that time, I'm afraid I have to inform the big leader and arrange for you to lead the tribe there. New Roseburg is building a settlement called New Ostara. Maybe you want to..."
Carlotta felt a little disappointed, but she also showed the role of a leader at the first time. Some temperament.
She puffed up her small chest and looked into Rurik's eyes: "Even if I am a child, I will revive my tribe. My destiny is also to be your wife, my tribe They are also your tribe."
"Yes. But your tribe will have to pay taxes in the future. This is a contract. When the new furnace starts to produce tools in large quantities, I will give you a large number of tools. People, but they have to pay taxes to me for generations. I think you know the concept of taxes! They must pay a part of the grain harvest and leather, in the final analysis, they are all for the expense of our Ross tribe.”
Carlotta sighed silently. She felt that Rurik's words were offended: "Your tribe..."
For a moment, Rurik smiled consciously because of his slip of the tongue.
"Well, maybe I should spread an idea."
"What idea?" Carlotta asked.
"What is Ross? Is it a tribe, an alliance, or everything to us? In my opinion, whether it is you, the Covin people, or the deer herders, as long as it is the same as us Ross people, As long as he recognizes my father, me and my descendants as the leader, he can call himself a Russian."
Rurik felt that what he said was very clear. Here, the four female relatives still felt inexplicable, or it could be said that Rurik's ideas were a bit ahead of their time, and the atmosphere was quiet.
What can Rurik do when faced with the embarrassment? He smiled awkwardly, gritted his teeth and said simply: "Forget it! Let me put it simply, many years later I succeeded the leader. As long as he agrees to be loyal to me, the great leader, and swears an oath to me, I will recognize him as a Russian. , he can also call himself a Rus. From now on, Kovin people, deer farmers, Ostara people, and Novgorod people, we are all Rus."
He is crazily hinting at a concept called "nation", which is a "nation-state", in order to integrate multiple ethnic groups with different languages and cultures into a completely new national form, or to merge into a country that combines many previous tribal cultures. nationality.
The concept is too advanced and the atmosphere is still cold.
It is not that they express resistance, but in fact their concept of ethnic group itself is very vague. Even the Ostara people never mind condescending to a strong man, all they need is a stable living space. They even thought about the book "Ostara"It means to describe the concept of an island, and there is nothing lingering about it. The survivors can only rely on the kind-hearted Ross tribe to support them, so what else can they ask for?
The situation was too embarrassing, Rurik simply waved his hand, "I'm tired, I just want to rest now."
"Then scrub yourself and go to bed immediately." After that, , Niya immediately called the maid to prepare hot water.
I am afraid that Nina is the only one who understands what her son said. She marvels at his ambition, but is full of worries about the uncertainty of the future. However, I am really too old. The future should be bright, just like my son described how he smelted a large amount of molten iron to make iron tools with unprecedented efficiency. I am afraid that this is the only thing I can see in my lifetime.