Iron smelting and other equipment were built beside a flowing river to facilitate water quenching. At the same time, water drainage was built in the water to use water power instead of manpower for blast operations.

Liu An did not expect that people at this time had actually learned to use water power, which surprised him.

Sure enough, Chinese people are very smart, both ancient and modern!

A high platform of about two meters was built by the river. On one side of the high platform were two shaft furnaces. After Liu An asked the blacksmith, he learned that these furnaces were used to burn iron.

Above the high platform is a flat surface used to store some materials, such as charcoal, iron materials, limestone, etc. At this time, a lot of materials are already placed on it.

Under the high platform, near the water, there are two forging furnaces. Here are the blacksmiths forging iron and making iron tools. There are also a few buckets of water beside the furnace.

It was indeed pure water, not the animal urine in Liu An's memory.

In his previous life, when Liu An was still studying in school, he read about using animal urine and animal fat for quenching in a book about scientific inventions. He could no longer remember the details.

He also couldn't remember the nature, principles, functions, and specific operations.

However, he could tell his idea to the experienced blacksmith. For this reason, he had specially prepared these two things in the past few days and had his men load them on the carriage and transport them here.

In my memory, that article also introduced the use of the steel filling method. It seemed that someone in the Western Jin Dynasty used the steel filling method with animal urine and grease to refine some weapons.

Liu An also doesn't remember clearly the steel filling method. He only remembers placing the wrought iron under the pig iron and burning it together in the furnace, but he has no idea of ​​its effect.

Putting this matter aside, Liu An continued to inspect the equipment built by the blacksmiths.

Between the forge and the high platform, there is a smaller furnace with a crucible-shaped pot on it, and a blocked outlet below the pot.

After Liu An asked the blacksmith, he learned that this pot was a tool for frying steel. However, the production speed of this pot was extremely slow. When making ordinary ironware, blacksmiths did not need steel frying tools.

After only looking around for a short while, Liu An was already sweating profusely because the furnace had been built yesterday evening and had been preheated all night since last night.

Liu An saw the sweat on the faces of the young men who were adding charcoal, iron and limestone to the furnace, as if they had been caught in the rain, dripping down.

Liu An found Fu Zhao, who was in charge of the blacksmith-related work here, and told Fu Zhao about the steel filling method and urine grease quenching in his memory, but Fu Zhao didn't know the reason.

But he was very interested in the method proposed by Liu An, so he immediately asked people to collect animal urine, raised the forge, and brought a piece of wrought iron to try it out.

When the temperature in the forging furnace reached the standard for forging iron, some of the animal urine happened to be collected, and the order was given to people to pour the urine into the bucket.

Because the time was too short, only a small part was collected, not even one-third of the barrel.

Fu Zhao took a piece of iron bar and heated it in the forging furnace. When the iron bar was white-hot, he quickly took it out with iron tongs and placed it in a bucket.

Along with a pungent smell and a large amount of white mist, there was a sizzling sound in the water.

After a while, Fu Zhao took out the iron bar and inspected it, then struck it with a sledgehammer. After repeated observations and comparing it with the parts that had not been quenched by urine, he was surprised to come to a conclusion.

"Your Majesty, this urine not only shortens the speed at which the iron cools, but also makes the quenched iron harder. However... its toughness has been reduced a lot, and it has become much more brittle than quenching with water.

"

"So... how about using grease to quench it?" Liu An tried to suggest.

After waiting for so long, the people transporting animal urine and oil finally arrived here.

Liu An asked people to get grease and some urine to add Fu Zhao's bucket of urine to the appropriate water level, and then asked Fu Zhao to try again.

This time, after the iron bar was burned with paper and white-hot, it was put into a bucket filled with grease and quenched. After the temperature of the iron bar dropped, the iron bar was taken out for observation.

I was surprised to find that quenching with grease is exactly the opposite of quenching with urine. The quenched iron bar is extremely tough, but its hardness is not enough and it is easy to crack and deform.

Iron smelting is a tedious job, and the work of adding coal, iron materials, and limestone to the furnace must be repeated over and over again, which must last until at least the afternoon.

Moreover, there were other blacksmiths watching over there. They were all experienced blacksmiths, so Fu Zhao felt free to try quenching with new substances here.

During this period, Fu Zhao tried multiple quenching methods such as urine - grease, grease - urine, urine - grease - urine, grease - urine - grease, etc.

Even later, three more blacksmiths joined in to help with the experiment.

After many attempts, it was finally concluded that quenching the iron with animal urine when the temperature is high, and then quenching with grease after the temperature drops, can ensure that the iron has sufficient hardness and toughness, making it less likely to deform.

And the iron tools tempered by this method can still produce up to standard weapons even without going through thousands of forgings.

In this way, the crafting speed of both weapons and agricultural tools will be doubled.

If you are just building a farm tool with low requirements, you can even mold it into a good shape, then reheat it, and then directly quench it with two liquids to become a qualified farm tool.

And the crafting of weapons does not need to be as troublesome as before, especially the hundred-forged weapons. Now you can produce weapons that are comparable to them without going through a hundred forgings!

This major breakthrough in technology excited the old blacksmith.

After working as a blacksmith all his life, he never imagined that in his later years, he would be able to personally complete a reform of the blacksmith craft.

If such technology could be promoted, the iron-making efficiency of thousands of blacksmiths in the Han Dynasty would surely increase several times.

But if the hundred-forging process is really omitted, another disadvantage will arise.

That is, there are too many impurities in the iron. Fu Zhao had already discovered it when he first observed it. Although the iron has extremely high hardness and toughness, if you look carefully, you can find that it contains many impurities.

The Hundred Forging process can not only increase the hardness and toughness of iron, but also remove many impurities from the iron.

Therefore, this method can only be used for low-level weapons and agricultural tools that do not care about their appearance.

This point was not stated explicitly in the recruitment. I only hope that the steel filling method proposed by the county leader can solve this problem.

After successfully completing the double-liquid quenching experiment and achieving a major breakthrough, Fu Zhao had great expectations for the method Liu An mentioned of placing wrought iron under pig iron for co-smelting.

He only took a small amount of wrought iron from home, but it was not enough to smelt with pig iron.

We can only wait for the first batch of wrought iron to come out of the furnace, wait for it to cool, and try again.

After hearing about it, several other blacksmiths also came over to try it out. They replaced the three blacksmiths who came to help before and looked at the furnace, and they started operating it excitedly.

Fu Zhao looked on from the side and showed several people how to operate.

After several people tried it, they were very happy when they looked at the iron bars with good hardness and toughness in their hands.

Originally, a few people wanted to try again, but someone from the furnace said that the iron juice was ready to be released.

Calculating the time, more than four hours have passed since the filling started in the morning, and it is indeed ready to be baked.

So a group of people came to the furnace. Fu Zhao and another experienced blacksmith each took a furnace. With the help of his subordinates, they opened the slag discharge valve under the furnace and released the slag.

Then put the iron fan prepared in advance under the iron juice outlet, open the valve, and then streams of hot and red iron juice flow into the iron fan.

After the iron juice stopped flowing out of the outlet, the two people blocked the valve. After waiting for the wrought iron in the iron mold to cool, they first separated a part and put it into the furnace, then poured the pig iron into it, and then poured the wrought iron into it.

and pig iron, and so on.

It is worth mentioning that during the experiment on the quenching method, Fu Zhao did not forget that the amount of meteorite iron was not large, and promptly stopped adding iron materials to the furnace.

At this time, only a small part of the wrought iron and pig iron was added, not all of it.

After all, the steel-filling method Liu An mentioned is still in the testing stage. If it fails, it won't hurt if a bit of meteorite iron is wasted.

Liu An waited here until late at night, and the iron liquid smelted by the steel filling method finally came out.

After the iron juice cooled down, Liu An hurriedly asked Fu Zhao: "How?"

Fu Zhao took the iron block to the blazing flame, observed it carefully, and said in surprise: "Back to the county, this method of pouring steel removes a large number of impurities in the iron. The iron refined by this method can save a lot of energy."

Removing a large part of the forging process has indeed greatly improved the forging process! If combined with the double-liquid quenching method proposed by the County Lord, we can definitely create a sharper and tougher weapon than the current generation!"

"Okay! Continue to use this method to smelt iron!" Liu An nodded, feeling very happy in his heart.

With these two methods, as long as a large amount of iron ore is obtained cheaply, the army's armament no longer needs to rely so much on the system.

Perhaps the weapons created in this way are still not as good as the systematic ones, but as long as they are large enough and better than those of other princes, it is enough for Liu An!

It was getting late at night, so Liu An called Liu Bei and arranged for his men to take turns taking care of the furnace so as not to tire them out, so he took advantage of the moonlight and returned to the county government office.

Early on the next morning, Liu An ordered the powerful men in Wuyuan to search for iron raw materials for him and transport them to Jiuyuan City.

Although he is not short of weapons now, farmers are short of farm tools. Ordinary farmers have few iron farm tools at home. Many of them are borrowed from the powerful men they depend on, or neighbors borrow farm tools that they do not have.

If Liu An wants to increase the overall productivity of Wuyuan, iron farm tools are essential.

After arranging the matter, Liu An came to the smelting plant in the northern mountainous area again.

At this time, the second batch of meteorite juice had been released, and was poured into the molds of Fang Tian's painted halberd, two-handed sword, and spear.

This was what Liu An had ordered before. He sought the opinions of Lu Bu, Liu Bei, Zhang Fei, and Gao Shun. The weapons they wanted were Fang Tian's painted halberd, male and female double swords, and spears. Gao Shun and

Like Zhang Fei, they both chose spears.

I know that Liu An's force value is low, and he also has the novice Junzi Sword given by the system, so it doesn't matter if he doesn't make weapons for the time being.

After filling the molds for the four weapons, Fu Zhao saw that there was still meteorite being smelted in the furnace, so he asked Liu An:

"What are the remaining meteorites used for?"

Although he had brought molds for various weapons at home, he still had to prepare them in advance to prevent him from being in a hurry when the iron juice came out of the furnace.

"Hmm..." Liu An thought for a moment and said, "Let's wait and see. Can we make four weapons today?"

Fu Zhao shook his head and said: "I will wait for a few people to work together to make at most two weapons. This is after the county magistrate improved the craftsmanship. According to the past, it would take one person at least several days to forge a weapon made of such divine iron.

.”

"Then let's make the double-pronged sword first." Liu Ande said.

"Promise!" After hearing this, Fu Zhao and several blacksmiths prepared to forge, leaving only two blacksmiths to guard the furnace.

All the iron from the meteorite has been poured into the furnace. After this round of iron juice comes out, there will be no more iron smelting because there is no need to add more materials to it.
To be continued...