136 Annoying success (1/2)
26th April 1574
Waking up in the morning, I hoped that I could once again sneakily craft some concrete from the limestone blocks, only to realise that rather than waking up by myself, it was one of the workers shaking my arm.
”What's g-goin on…”
With my mind still trying its best to return to the sweet dream in which I was spending quality time with Elia in the modern world, showing her all the wonders of the civilisation, it took me a while to shake the sleepiness off and realise that I couldn't see any sunlight from the small opening between the side of the tent and its pulled opening cloth.
”Sir, they finished the furnace!”
Only when hearing those words did I manage to push my sleepiness aside, shake my head to clear it from the remnants of the dreaming state and properly move out from the bedding made by placing several blankets directly on the hard ground.
While I could easily organise some better sleeping place for myself, I still decided to keep my own tent as spartan as every other sleeping place was in the entire camp. For this small cost of my own comfort at sleeping, I gained quite a lot of sympathy from the workers, allowing me to drive them even harder while they were working.
”Sure, I will be there right away. Go and tell them to prepare everything.”
With how some of the workers offered to work through the night to finish laying down the last layers of the bricks, finishing the blast furnace was only to be expected. Outside of the simple, brick structure of the entire building, all that was changed from the commonly known blueprint was the air intake.
Rather than using standard bellows, we mounted a set of three sets of fan blades mounted on a simple, thin pipe, that was later connected to the flywheel powered by the steam horse right beside it. With this done, as soon as the basic fire would start burning inside and lodge itself in the charcoal, we could turn the fire under the steam horse on and start pumping crazy amounts of fresh air right inside the burning chamber, supplying more than enough air for the burning process to reach greater temperature than ever achieved elsewhere!
As I moved out of my tent, rather than going directly for the furnace, I took a swing by the stockpile, where ten different clay forms was waiting for their first use. Since I wasn't going to make a proper pressure steam engine right away but rather it's cut in a half prototype that would allow me to measure the distance and lengths of the required parts, and adjust everything before going for the real thing.
The moment I came back, the workers finally received the signal they awaited for and started throwing iron ore and charcoal in turns, slowly but steadily filling the entire thing almost all the way to the top.
Due to the fact that the amount of ore we had was limited rather than allowing us for a continuous supply of it, this furnace would work only for as long as both the fuel and the iron ore would be supplied to it, forcing my people to waste a lot of time cleaning it after it would be extinguished.