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After the summer, the kiln factory has been shut down.

It rained heavily at the end every few days, and firewood was no longer available, and the clay and clay were also greatly affected.

The main reason is that there is insufficient demand and cannot afford to maintain a kiln factory.

Except for the fact that several tribes came to trade after the Witch Lord Conference last year, pottery had no sales to the outside world.

Together, several primitive tribes with a total of nearly 1,000 people had almost zero wealth accumulation.

Any business development must be supported by demand and equal wealth in order to become active.

At present, the Ba tribe is dominant and has occupied the most precious wealth of pottery and linen alone. The other tribes are poor and cannot take out any of the things the Ba tribe needs to replace.

He wanted copper ore, but the Wu tribe had it, but there was no way to do it now.

The salt is in urgent need, and even if there is salt, the demand for only 50 people in the Ba people cannot be too large, and it cannot support the scale of commercial transactions at all.

The plan to promote business is now in a dead end.

Although other tribes certainly still have demand, this demand cannot meet the continuous operation of the kiln factory, and it has been fired for several months. Now the kiln factory has accumulated a lot of pottery, and it is no longer meaningful to continue wasting manpower to fire more.

Therefore, after the great witches and the others visited the Old Mother's Day, the kiln factory was completely stopped.

After entering the midsummer of May, after Xu Chen finished making several jars of fruit wine, he was no longer willing to go out and suffer.

The sun and rainstorms alternate, and the climate is capricious. During the day, the temperature has risen to at least about forty degrees. It is impossible to exercise heavily. After sweating for a few years, people feel exhausted.

After several days of cultivation, he felt bored again, so he decided to restart the kiln factory, but instead of firing pottery, he wanted to try copper, click on a new skill again, and upgrade his identity to the copper rig.

The emergence of metal smelting is a milestone mark in the evolution of human civilization.

If slash-and-burn slash-and-burn marks the entry of human beings from the Paleolithic Age into the Neolithic Age, then the emergence of metal smelting technology, especially bronze ware, almost marks the complete escape from the barbaric and primitive tribal clan stage and enters the real period of royal civilization. In the later generations, it was specially named the Bronze Age, which was the first time that human beings entered a period of civilization in a truly sense.

In China, the emergence of bronze ware was roughly between the late Xia Dynasty and the early Shang Dynasty.

And this happened to be the early days of the dynasty, and the prototype of the country began to appear.

The rise of the Yanhuang tribe, expelling Chiyou from occupying the Yellow River Basin, opened up the orthodox source of Chinese civilization, but at that time there was no text or any record. All records of these wars were processed by later generations based on language information passed down from generation to generation by the people. The scale, time, size and even authenticity are subject to debate.

Because these records are too general and do not conform to the facts, they have a strong mythological color.

However, the emergence of bronze ware has given these historical evidence a certain authority and foundation.

For example, foreigners do not recognize the existence of the Xia Dynasty in China, but the discovery of the Sanxingdui site can extend the existence of Chinese civilization to the end of the Neolithic period from about 3,000 to 2,000 BC.

Because the time period of this site is continuous, it exists in different regions and stages from stone sites to bronze sites, which can fully prove the excessiveness of Chinese ancestors from the Neolithic Age to the Bronze Age.

Although Xu Chen can skillfully identify large amounts of ore types, smelting metal is a separate process. Moreover, the metal smelting he knows are large-scale systemic high-tech equipment, and it is also divided into dry and wet methods, which have nothing to do with this primitive earth kiln.

More importantly, copper ore alone is useless for birds.

The metal copper is very soft, and the higher the purity, the less useless it is. It must be melted into bronze to increase hardness and strength.

However, bronze is an alloy, and two metals need to be added, and the proportion must be appropriate.

But at present, he did not find the existence of these two important ores from the ores he exchanged and collected.

In other words, even if he smelted the copper, he would never be able to make bronze.

But the meal must be eaten bit by bit.

Human civilization finally smelted bronze through thousands of years. He was too anxious to come, so he could only accumulate his family's fortunes one by one.

Besides, when beating a child on rainy days, I am idle too.

Recently, the weather is hot and boring, and I always need to do something to appear like a time travel waste.

There is only one way to smel copper at present, that is, dry earth blast furnace.

Since the second large kiln was found, the first experimental kiln has been used very little. The volume is too small and wastes firewood, which has become a bit useless.

The temperature of copper smelting is similar to that of firing pottery, but the process is much more complicated.

Pottery does not have the so-called melting point or strict molding temperature like metals. As long as the kiln temperature reaches a certain range, the mud blank will slowly enter the hardening and forming stage. In fact, it is the process of melting elements such as ferrosilicon in the clay to form a glazing process. However, the glazing does not have a fixed melting point, and there will be a huge fluctuation range depending on the elements contained.

But smelting metals is completely different. If they cannot reach the required critical temperature, they cannot be successfully smelted.

Moreover, during the smelting process, to ensure that the metal copper melts and gathers and does not mix with the slag, there must be a method of slag production and a method of separating copper.

These processes are much more complicated than throwing the pottery into the earthen kiln and burning it with fire.

Therefore, we must first transform the small earth kiln into a small blast furnace that can be used to smel metals.

This was a great test for Xu Chen.

However, at least, a senior intellectual who has been in higher education for more than ten years. Although it is not in the smelting of metals, he has never eaten pork and seen pigs running. Smelting copper and iron, the two most widely used and oldest metals in humans, does not require too profound technology, and it is all about making miracles.

He believed that as long as the blast furnace was designed correctly, it would be done with a high fire.

Simple and crude and easy to use, it is a bit expensive.

At present, firewood is the most valuable.

Although it is the peak summer season when the plants and trees are most prosperous, hundreds of trees were cut down last year. A large number of branches left at the foot of the mountain. After several months of wind and sun, it has been dry and used as firewood.

As for the hard work of picking firewood and burning kilns, he naturally wouldn't do it. The four kiln workers have been idle recently and have obviously grown white and fat. They need to work so that they can maintain their physical shape and strength. Otherwise, they will be fat and will not be in line with the aesthetic taste of savages.

You say it's hot, sorry, savages are not afraid of heat, they are only afraid of thunder.

After carefully studying the ceramic plate for two days, Xu Chen decided to start.

First, let the kiln worker remove part of the small earth kiln and redesign a new furnace.

Because there is no coal and carbon, all rely on firewood to heat up, this blast furnace is designed to have two layers inside and outside.

The outer layer is a small earth kiln, and the inner layer is made of fire bricks and clay, which is about two feet in diameter, like a crucible.

In order to obtain cleaner copper, a slag outlet and an outlet for emitting copper juice must be designed.

Because it was the first time to design a civil blast furnace, even though Xu Chen had some superficial thoughts in his mind, he still faced many practical difficulties in the actual production process. Therefore, under his guidance and leadership, the four kiln workers repeatedly modified it and took a full four days to finally complete the renovation of the earth kiln.

After the blast furnace was repaired, the fumigation furnace was used for a day, and then the firewood and ore were prepared.

Although there is a lot of wood at the foot of the mountain, it still takes a lot of effort to get it back. You have to cut it into appropriate sizes and carry it back. This is the task of the four kiln workers.

Xu Chen himself took Gu Heju to clean up the hundreds of kilograms of copper ore that he had exchanged from the Wu tribe, smashed it with stones and put it into the inner liner.

After the ore treatment is completely put into the furnace, dry firewood is filled layer by layer between the inner liner and the outer furnace.

In order to ensure that the firewood can be kept burning and heated for a long time, try to choose a larger firewood as much as possible. In order to burn fully, air channels must be exposed overhead when stacking to ensure the supply of oxygen.

In blast furnace smelting, the most basic principle of copper and iron is the oxidation reaction at high temperatures.

Use oxygen to release elements such as thio in the ore through combustion, and the rest is metal components.

Therefore, ensuring sufficient oxygen supply is the key to successful smelting.

The earth kiln re-encloses the furnace door, and the furnace chamber is stuffed into hay and ignites.

As the rolling smoke rose in the kiln factory again, Xu Chen finally let go.

Whether success or not depends entirely on luck.

And this is also a one-time transaction. He used up all the copper ore at one time. Although it sounds like a few hundred kilograms, in fact, it only fills one-third of the inner liner when put in.

This kind of earth blast furnace was almost fabricated by him, and it was completely nonsense.

But he only has this one method right now.

And he firmly believes in the power of miracles.

As long as the firepower is strong enough, nothing can be burned.
Chapter completed!