Since May, Lingao Textile Factory has steadily delivered 30,000 pieces of cloth to the Guangzhou market every month, including silk-like old Qiongzhou cloth and more ordinary cotton cloth, but the price is three percent lower than the market price, which is called new Qiongzhou cloth. Pen, fun, and www.biquge.info

If the old Qiongzhou cloth into the Guangzhou market can also be seen as a new product to test the original product pattern, its volume is not enough to disrupt the entire cotton market, then this month tens of thousands of old Qiongzhou cloth is enough to impact the original status of ordinary cotton cloth, not to mention the quality of the same and lower price of the new Qiongzhou cloth, a full of about 20,000 horses per month, enough to make the entire Guangzhou cotton market an earthquake.

Zhang's cloth shop began the relayout of the whole city, opened a number of branches, realized the coverage of the whole city with points and areas, and launched an indiscriminate offensive against the original old cloth shop.

Under the continuous impact of Qiongzhou cloth, a large number of small and medium-sized cloth merchants went bankrupt, their fabrics could not be sold, the funds could not be returned, and the price would be reduced and the losses would be lost.

The only ones who can survive this frenzy are the powerful big cloth merchants, whose advantage is that they have sufficient funds and can resist the impact of unsalable, and they have stable orders from the government or other industries, these channels are temporarily untouchable by Zhang's cloth company.

In addition to the bankruptcy of small and medium-sized cloth merchants, the long-term impact is the large-scale shutdown of family-run workshops in the Pearl River Delta region.

Although the largest cotton cloth production area in the Ming Dynasty was Songjiang Province in the south of the Yangtze River, most of it was exported to Japan and Europe. The peasants in the Pearl River Delta region, after growing grain, the biggest source of income is spinning and weaving, which is supplied to the two regions for their own production and own use.

Now, under the suppression of Qiongzhou cloth, the local cotton cloth is unsalable, and there are no merchants to buy it, so these farmers have fallen into a vicious circle of not being able to sell the cloth -- no income -- no money to buy cotton spinning and weaving -- and no income.

Without this income, it will be extremely difficult to bear the grain burden -- since Zhang Juzheng of the Wanli Dynasty reformed and implemented the "one whip law", except for the Suzhou and Hangzhou areas in the south of the Yangtze River, all other areas have changed to the folded color, that is, converted into colored silver -- the original peasant households could use the weaving to share the pressure of folding silver, but now they can only rely on the income from growing grain.

Many peasant households could not afford the heavy taxes, their families could not open the pot, and they had to face the collection of fierce and vicious officials, and they had no choice but to leave their hometowns, and there were many farmers from the Pearl River Delta region in Guangzhou. These are all later words, and the influence of Qiongzhou cloth only affected the cloth merchants in Guangzhou City at this time.

With the hot sale of Qiongzhou cloth, Lingao Textile Factory can obtain a gross profit of more than 12,000 taels of silver per month, which is not an exaggeration to describe it as a sea of gold and silver.

Xia Nan knows the truth of "the husband is not guilty, but he is guilty", Lingao Textile Factory is now a chicken that lays golden eggs, if there is not enough strength to resist the covetousness of the outside world, sooner or later it will be meat on someone else's chopping board.

Summer South's ambition is to build an all-firearms force. So iron-making, gun-casting, and cannon casting were put on the agenda.

When it comes to ironmaking, Lin Weiye is an expert. He informed Xia Nan: "Taking into account the existing processing capacity, wrought iron is used to make guns, and cast iron is used to cast guns. Specifically, wrought iron is the steel that can be trained under ancient metallurgical conditions - low-carbon steel; Cast iron is an iron-carbon alloy smelted from pig iron, which is mainly divided into white cast iron, gray cast iron and malleable cast iron. ”

As soon as several professional terms came out, it made the summer south dizzy. He hurriedly stopped, "Can you consider my feelings and explain them in more layman's terms."

Lin Weiye smiled: "No problem, I am only responsible for technical issues, and it is up to you to decide which route to choose." ”

He explained the materials in simple, easy-to-understand terms. The ancients called wrought iron, that is, low-carbon steel, a kind of carbon steel.

Carbon steel is the earliest and most used basic material in modern industry. Before the modern steel industry made alloy steel, carbon steel was the earliest, with low cost, wide performance range and the largest amount.

Carbon steel is divided into three types: low carbon steel, medium carbon steel, and high carbon steel, and its performance mainly depends on the carbon content, the carbon content increases, the strength and hardness of the steel increases, and the plasticity, toughness and weldability decrease, so the low carbon steel is easy to accept various processing such as forging, welding and cutting, and the high carbon steel has the highest hardness, but it is not conducive to shaping and welding.

As for cast iron, the ancient furnaces are all white iron, this kind of cast iron has low carbon and silicon, and the carbon mainly exists in the form of cementite, and the fracture is silvery-white, so it is called white iron, which is easy to produce shrinkage holes and cracks. High hardness, brittleness, can not withstand impact loads, in a word, with this kind of iron cast cannon is easy to blow up.

Xia Nan digested it for a while and concluded: "That is to say, steel is used to make guns, and iron is used to make cannons, you call them cast cannons?" ”

"Yes, the production of the barrel and body of the gun requires a material with good processing ability, in layman's terms, it can be made by hammering; The production method of the cannon is completely different, compared with the light barrel, the body of the cannon cannot be made by hammering and forging, and can only be cast in a pre-made mold with molten iron. ”

"Can't you make a cannon from wrought iron in the same way you make a gun? Or is it okay to cast the cannon directly from molten steel? ”

"There are also those made of wrought iron and wound into cannons, but this is not the mainstream. This method can make small cannons, but not heavy cannons, and it is too time-consuming and inefficient. As for the molten steel casting cannon, wait until the end of the 19th century after the birth of the Krupp company, now it is pure delusion, even if the steel pipe cannon is built under the existing technology, there is only one end - the explosion of the chamber, and then what do you use to process the steel pipe, what is harder than steel under the existing conditions, is it difficult to bite with teeth? ”

"Okay, I think I basically know how to make it, so back to the material." Xia Nan's thinking is very clear, the industrial base and production method determine the choice of material, "Is it difficult to smelt low carbon steel and cast iron?" ”

"If you don't pursue the steel with perfect hardness and toughness, only refining low-carbon steel, the technical difficulty is not high, the Ming Dynasty has a mature wrought iron smelting technology, in fact, it is fried steel, craftsmen are also ready-made, all we have to do is to optimize the process, improve the furnace, and achieve large-scale mass production." "But the material of cast iron is a problem, white iron is obviously not suitable for casting cannons, and it is quite difficult to get gray iron. ”