In the process of steelmaking, a large amount of carbon will seep into the molten steel, so what comes out is basically high-carbon steel.

SolutionSu Chengyu knows very well that only need to add rust, that is, iron oxide, and use the strong oxidation of ferric iron ions to oxidize the carbon in the molten steel into carbon dioxide and discharge, and then you can get low carbon steel.

Xiong Zhong asked the craftsman to try it according to the method Su Chengyu said, and he really got soft steel.

But this operation created a new problem, and the molten steel inside the crucible became a paste.

Su Chengyu listened to Xiong Zhong's description and immediately understood that it was due to the high melting point of mild steel, and the temperature of the crucible could not liquefy it.

Crucible steelmaking can only reach 1,500 degrees, which is just over the melting point of high-carbon steel, while low-carbon steel needs to be close to 1,600 degrees to liquefy. Don't underestimate this 100 degrees, it took nearly 100 years for humans to master the method of melting low carbon steel.

In fact, pasty mild steel is nothing, but the carbon is a little unevenly distributed. But Su Chengyu thought that he would not leave the iron field in the near future anyway, so it would be better to simply have a technical transformation.

The most direct way to increase the temperature of the steelmaking furnace is to increase the regenerative hot air chamber.

Immediately, he thought that since he wanted to build a hot air room, he should simply put hot air on the blast furnace for ironmaking.

In this way, the furnace temperature can be increased to more than 1200 degrees, and the molten iron of pig iron has good fluidity at this temperature, and the pretreatment of molten iron dephosphorization and desulfurization can be carried out. One step closer to modern steelmaking technology.

So he had a mason come in and build three thick brick houses in front of the iron-making blast furnace.

Since there were no honeycomb refractory bricks, he made it simple and asked a mason to build the refractory bricks in a continuous "field" shape in the brick house.

After the hot air chamber is put into use, these refractory bricks will be heated to more than seven or eight hundred degrees. Then the cool breeze sent by the blower passes through a large number of refractory bricks arranged in the word "Tian" and is fed into the furnace. At this time, the cool breeze has been heated to more than 300 degrees.

The surface of the hot air room is sealed with thick soil, and a simple set of hot air equipment is completed.

Su Chengyu also instructed the craftsmen to build some thick cast iron pipes, which were used to connect the hot air chamber with the air inlet of the iron-making blast furnace and the steel-making furnace.

He originally planned to introduce the high-temperature exhaust gases from the chimney of the iron-making blast furnace into the hot air chamber to store heat, which is also a common method in the modern ironmaking industry.

However, the craftsmen were too slow to make cast iron pipes, and it took sixty or seventy meters of iron pipes to divert the exhaust gas from the blast furnace, so he finally gave up the idea of saving energy and directly heated the hot air chamber with coal.

Three days later, the hydraulic forging machine was first installed and put into use.

The water wheel rotates rapidly under the impetus of the river, and through a series of transmission devices, a forging hammer is driven to continuously hit the forging platform, making a series of dang sounds.

Chu Di clamped a piece of red-hot iron and put it on the forging table. The hammer slammed down, instantly splattering a spark.

He was caught off guard, and the iron was quickly knocked out of a large hole.

He wiped his sweat and quickened the movements of his hands, and after a long time, he was finally able to keep up with the speed of the forging machine.

Normally, it takes two craftsmen to forge for half an hour to knock the iron into strips, but at present, Chu first relied on a hydraulic forging machine and it took less than three minutes to complete the forging.

The amazing efficiency left the surrounding craftsmen jaw-dropping. More fast-responding craftsmen hula hula came up, this touch and that knock, the end of the novelty.

"To say that the owner is really a god! He was able to make a blacksmith out of iron and wood. ”

"This thing is faster than Liu Laosi's hands."

"That's it. Also, you see that it doesn't know it's tired at all, no matter how fast Liu Laosi's hands are, they can't last an hour. ”

"Could it be that our owner is the reincarnation of Luban?"

"Don't talk nonsense, Lu Ban is a carpenter, don't you see that this forging machine is full of iron? If you want me to say, eighty percent is the reincarnation of Zhuge Wuhou. This thing is comparable to a wooden ox and a flowing horse! ”

On the side, Xiong Zhong quickly recovered from his surprise and said to Su Chengyu: "The owner is really ingenious!" With a hydraulic forging machine, two craftsmen should be able to make a pair of armor in two or three days. ”

Su Chengyu roughly calculated, according to this speed, there are forty or fifty craftsmen, and they can complete the forging of three hundred sets of half-body armor in two months. He hurriedly ordered the construction of the other two hydraulic forging machines to be accelerated.

By the afternoon of the same day, Lu Ning and others, under the command of Su Chengyu, also completed the manufacturing of the foot boring machine.

Only one boring drill was produced. First, high-carbon steel itself is extremely difficult to process, and secondly, this kind of drill bit novel shape craftsman has never done before, so the speed is naturally not fast.

The new boring machine is placed horizontally, like a giant "concave" character.

On the left side, on a section of screw-controlled push-pull slide rail, four consecutive wooden clamps are firmly fixed to the pipe. On the right is a slender boring drill with the drill bit and the pipe facing each other.

Behind the boring machine a man sits on a stool, stepping on a part shaped like a bicycle pedal, driven by a thick cow belt and spinning with a half-man-high iron flywheel.

The flywheel rotates at high speed with the drill pipe through a set of gears.

As the drill bit touched the pipe, fine iron filings splashed, and another person rotated the screw on the slide rail that held the pipe. The screw is continuously screwed in, pushing the slide slowly and steadily in a horizontal direction.

The whole process, whether it is the tube or the drill bit, is extremely stable and shows no signs of skewed.

After drilling for a while, another craftsman took a wet towel to wipe the gun tube to cool down. In just two quarters of an hour, the drill bit was more than a foot deep into the pipe!

These firearms craftsmen from Fujian have been numbed by Su Chengyu's various inventions, and they believe that he has learned some supernatural skills anyway.

Lu Ning took off the drilled section of the pipe and looked closely, the boring hole was smooth and flat, and it was very straight, no worse than the work of the most skilled craftsman.

"At this rate, it won't take half a day to drill this pipe."

The craftsman who was in charge of stepping on the pedal also stood up and praised: "This is much easier than pulling a bow to drill holes, and with this thing, you won't get tired of drilling for a day." ”

Su Chengyu summoned Lu Ning to the front and asked him, "If there are five or six guns, plus eighty or ninety craftsmen, can you make three thousand flintlock guns in two months?" ”

Lu Ning immediately nodded and said: "People don't stop boring the bed, and it won't take two months to make it." ”

"Good!" Su Chengyu nodded, "You don't want to do anything else these days, just take someone to make a boring machine." ”

There was a cheer from the craftsman beside him, and Su Chengyu turned his head to look, it turned out that the last trial pipe was drilled with a boring machine.

The machine and machine were ready-made, and several craftsmen put the gun tube in their hands, and a brand new flintlock gun was handed over to Su Chengyu.

The whole gun weighs less than ten catties, the caliber is close to 20 millimeters, and the length is about 1.5 meters.

Su Chengyu immediately took all the craftsmen to the barren beach next to the iron yard to test the guns.

Lu Ning and others have tried guns here many times, and wooden targets, brackets and other materials are readily available.

The new flintlock was loaded with ammunition and tied to a wooden frame, and someone pulled the trigger with a rope from a distance. I heard a loud bang, and a six-and-a-half-dollar lead bullet instantly blasted off more than half of the wooden target more than two inches thick.

Su Chengyu nodded and said, "The gun tube can withstand the seven-dollar gunpowder, which is enough on the battlefield." Take this gun as a model and build another 3,000 pieces. ”