The civil affairs, agricultural administration, and industry in Jingle and Lanxian are all in charge, and although there is still some chaos and there are often large and small problems, they are generally operating normally.

After Wang Jizong, Wen Cheng and others reported their work, Qin Chuan, who was isolated, was a little idle, so he simply went to Mengjiazhuang to watch the workers ramming the earth wall.

The original Mengjiazhuang covers an area of about 25 acres, and now the city wall is built 200 steps away, after the expansion is completed, it will be more than three times more than the original, covering an area of more than 80 acres, and will be built into a military fort, which will be the political center of Qinchuan forces for a period of time in the future.

As his old nest, Qin Chuan had already thought of a name in advance, and it was called Black Mountain Fort.

He is ready to be an old demon of Montenegro.

To the east of this future fort is a hillside, and the enemy will not be able to climb it by digging the hillside steeply.

But to the west and south, it is necessary to build a new city wall that is more than a mile long, about 600 meters.

It was a huge project, with about a thousand workers at work, and it took more than a month just to level the land, lay the foundation with stones, dig the moat, and use the excavated earth to ram the city walls.

Because the west side is the slope of the mountain range, the terrain is uneven, and there is a slope ditch, so the requirements of the city wall here are not very high, and the rammed earth city wall is built.

Nowadays, the western section has rammed the earthen wall more than one person high, about 200 steps long, and some of them have been built with red bricks on the outer wall, not with glutinous rice juice, but with cement, lime mortar and fine sand made of Qinchuan to make a modern mortar, which is stronger than glutinous rice juice.

After the exterior wall is built, a plywood will be erected on it, and the earth will continue to be rammed, and a layer of outer wall will be built on the rammed layer, and finally a wall of two feet and five feet high, that is, about eight meters.

The wall of the city wall is not vertical, but inclined inward about 80 degrees, mainly to prevent the wall from collapsing outward when it is bombarded.

To the south is the front of the entire military fort, which is relatively flat and open, so the wall on this side will be an unprecedented and historic reinforced concrete structure.

Qin Chuan has the heart of an infrastructure madman.

The south wall of the Black Mountain Fort is used to practice hands, it is planned to build three zhang high, the outer wall is two feet thick, and the Hongyi cannon of several thousand catties can not penetrate such a thick reinforced concrete, the inner wall is one and a half feet thick, hollow, a total of three stories high, and the inside can be used as a barracks.

Including the protruding enemy platform, the outer wall of each floor will have gun holes and cannon holes, and soldiers can shoot outward, from the bottom to the top, forming a three-dimensional defensive firepower.

This is just a test wall, if there is no problem with feasibility, practicability, cost, etc., Qin Chuan wants to build a few castles in the area of Naturalization City that will never fall.

That's right, he wants to send troops to the city of naturalization.

If according to historical development, Lin Dan Khan will burp next year, his son will surrender to Houjin, and from then on, the rich and rich Hetao region will completely fall into the hands of Houjin.

Qin Chuan wants to grab food, but within two or three years, he will definitely not have the strength to fight a large-scale field battle with Houjin, but he can be an infrastructure madman, building a military fort all the way and pushing it all the way.

He plans to complete the project within two years.

Before he could do it again, he had to get the rebar out.

After squatting outside Mengjiazhuang for a long time, Qin Chuan beat the Black Mountain and went to the iron yard and the cement factory to wander.

During the time he went out to suppress bandits, the iron mines, coal yards, and ironworks in Montenegro had all been paved with railroad tracks, and even several mines were connected to rail cars.

The original ore had to be carried out of the mine by the miners one by one, and then transported to the stockpile or Dajian furnace by mule cart or chicken bus, and after having the track, eight mules and eight rail cars completed the workload of dozens of mules and hundreds of people, and the efficiency was improved a lot.

Today, the track leading to the cement and lime factories is being laid, and when completed, a track will be laid from Montenegro to the town of Lou Fan, a total of 20 miles.

This is a big project, and it is also used by Qin Chuan to practice, if this track can be paved, he will dare to connect Lou Fu, Jingle and Lanxian by rail.

Yan Sanqi had already handed over the matter of casting rails and laying railways to a few skilled craftsmen, and the pot factory also had someone in charge, while he was busy with another thing: making steel bars.

Not long ago, according to the drawings given by Qin Chuan, he had made an iron mold for manufacturing steel bars and other corresponding equipment.

When he heard that Qin Chuan was back, he put down the iron mold and waited for Qin Chuan to guide him personally.

When Qin Chuan arrived at the iron field, Yan Sanqi led a group of craftsmen out to greet him outside the gate.

After a few steps away, Qin Chuan smiled and let them go in first, while he followed behind, a few steps away from them.

When he arrived at a newly built shed, Qin Chuan saw the mold he had designed himself.

This thing, in fact, is a large syringe.

Pour the colloidal molten iron into it, and then start squeezing, the molten iron will drill out of the hole half a finger thick at the front end, enter the rotating conveyor belt, and be carried forward, and the molten iron behind it will continue to be squeezed out, and finally form a long steel bar.

Qin Chuan doesn't know if it has reached the quality of steel, anyway, it can be called steel bar.

While he was observing, beside the refining furnace not far away, a furnace master shouted to this side: "Lord Qin, Mr. Yan, the molten iron has been refined. ”

"Okay, then hurry."

Qin Chuan immediately retreated and waved his hand to signal Yan Sanqi to start.

"Pour the molten iron and bring it over."

Yan Sanqi waved his hand towards the refining furnace.

The stove over there began to get busy, and not long after, a pot of molten iron was pushed by the chicken cart.

The steel bar factory next to the iron yard has not yet been built, so today's trial steel bar is temporarily carried out in the iron yard, and there is not much vacant land next to the Dajian furnace, so it is far away, and the molten iron can only be transported over.

When it was transported here, the original liquid molten iron was just cooled into a gelatinous form, which was just right for squeezing the steel bar.

Under the command of Yan Sanqi, two furnace masters poured molten iron into the iron mold, and then two craftsmen slowly pushed the piston shaft of the iron mold to squeeze the molten iron into the hole at the front end.

The red bars were quickly squeezed out and into the conveyor belt, slowly moving forward.

When the iron bar reached a zhang long, Yan Sanqi personally used a guillotine to cut the iron bar, and a steel bar half a finger thick and one zhang long came out.

There are still iron bars that are continuously squeezed out at the back, and when all the molten iron is consumed, exactly five steel bars are obtained.

Qin Chuan watched from the side, and there was no mistake in the whole process, but the manual operation was a little tired.

When the steel bars were almost cooled, Qin Chuan put on thick gloves and lifted one of them and checked it.

This is extruded from molten iron with a slightly higher carbon content than wrought iron, slightly thicker than the wire rod steel bar of later generations, from the cross-section, the quality is of course not as good as the wire rod steel bar, but the toughness is very good, and the quality should not be much worse.

After lifting up the other steel bars and checking them, Qin Chuan nodded with satisfaction: "Yes, just follow this method, when will the steel bar factory start?" ”

Yan Sanqi replied: "My lord, the furnace over there has been built, and the shed and the like have been built, but there is only one set of molds for the time being." ”

"How long will it take to make 20 sets of molds?"

"If you put the rails down first, it will take seven days."

"Okay, then suspend the production of rails first, make all efforts to make molds, and send a batch of steel bars to Lou Fu after half a month, and start construction on the south wall of Fort Montenegro."

"Yes."

"By the way, there is also iron wire, and then make a batch of small molds, used to make iron wire, the more this thing, the better, I will transfer a group of people to help you tomorrow, I just brought 10,000 people back, the labor is there, how many people are lacking here in Montenegro, you can ask Wen Cheng directly."

"Okay."

"What's going on at the pot factory?"

"Everything is going well, and now the pot factory has 30 sets of molds, excluding waste products, and can produce 400 iron pots per day."

"Well, that's right, after the production of steel bars and wires is on the right track, one or twenty sets of molds will be as high as possible, and there is no need to produce too much, just seven or eight hundred mouths a day."

"Yes."

"You guys are busy, I'll go to the cement factory and the lime factory."

"Okay, sir, go slowly."

Qin Chuan waved his hand to signal that they didn't need to send it, and left the iron yard with the red-clothed attendant and headed for the cement factory five miles away.

Today, Jingle and Lanxian have opened several gypsum factories, with a stable and sufficient source of gypsum, the cement plant has been able to reach the level of 20,000 catties per day.

20,000 catties is only 10 tons, which is a pitiful output for cement factories with a daily output of thousands of tons at every turn in later generations.

But it is already very good for Qin Chuan, you know, now it is all about manpower and accumulation to crush the stones, and then grind them into powder, these two processes consume most of the manpower and time.

The lime factory is next to the cement factory, digging three furnaces, the limestone is piled up in the furnace into an arch, and the coal is burned at the bottom, which can burn 60,000 catties of limestone at a time, and it takes four days and three nights to burn the stones, and when the stones are burned thoroughly, the lime will be born.

Today, Montenegro has formed a small industrial area, with coal mines, coking plants, iron mines, ironworks, iron pot factories, steel bars, cement factories, lime factories, and all workers add up to more than 8,000 people.

Moreover, it will continue to expand in the future, and there will be a steady increase in the number of workers.

After turning around, Qin Chuan beat his horse back to Lou Fu, and then called his father-in-law out and explained to him that the next time the Yang family in Texas came to buy iron materials and iron pots, they would not accept silver, and let them use grain to offset eighty percent of the payment, and the remaining two percent would be offset with other goods such as bronze and brass.

The grain obtained from the sale of iron and pots was used to feed the workers of Montenegro.