In fact, Chen Zhan started to make cannons that day, and he couldn't wait for the new furnace in the cannon factory to dry slowly, so he directly used the small furnace of the blacksmith shop, and the furnace named Yan Sanqi began to test the refined iron.

The iron cast cannon pipe has high requirements for the quality of iron, and the impurity content of pig iron smelted in this era is very high, coupled with the insufficient furnace temperature of the blast furnace, the content of molten iron and silicon is low, and the cooling is too fast during casting, resulting in the fact that the graphite does not have time to precipitate and obtain white iron that is easy to brittle.

This situation will cause a very high scrap rate, and the cast cannon is easy to blow up, so it can only be prevented by thickening the barrel, or using wrought iron-clad pig iron, copper-clad iron core, etc.

The cost of building a cannon in this way is high, the cost is too high, the second is too time-consuming, and the cannon is extremely bulky.

What Qinchuan needs to do is to improve the smelting technology, the most basic is to increase the furnace temperature, and the casting secondary refining furnace will produce less magazines and higher silicon content of molten iron.

Then, Gong Zhenlin's iron mold method and Rodman's internal mold water cooling technology were combined, and the cooling rate of the iron cannon was controlled by preheating the mold or warming the box insulation, and the gray iron cannon was cast.

If the above method could not achieve the gray iron cannon barrel, he could only settle for the next best thing, turning the white iron into black-hearted ductile malleable cast iron, so as to improve the compressive strength and toughness of the cannon barrel.

These methods are easy to say, but the actual difficulty will be very large, very, very big.

Hardware problems such as iron molds and water-cooled pipes are not difficult, but the difficult thing is the software, which is the temperature control.

The main problems are how many degrees the iron mold is heated, the size and speed of the water-cooled water flow, the wind speed and the size of the nozzle of the air-cooled, the temperature and time of the insulation, the temperature and time of annealing, etc.

In the absence of corresponding instruments, we can only rely on continuous experimentation, you know, Rodman groped for a whole decade to complete the specific quantification and large-scale casting.

Of course, Qin Chuan couldn't wait that long, his advantage was that he knew that this was a feasible method, knew the principle, and knew a few general methods.

The most important thing is that he has the money, the people, and the iron, and can put in the experiments without restrictions.

If you smash three or five hundred thousand pig iron into it, you should be able to find out the data of the system.

The first thing he had to solve was the problem of iron smelting.

The iron of the Ming Dynasty has always been of much better quality in the south than in the north, because there are many trees in the south, and there are fewer impurities in the pig iron smelted from charcoal.

Yan Sanqi worked as a furnace in the Fujian official iron field for more than ten years, and he was also a Chinese expert, and he proposed to smelt some refined iron like Fujian iron, and to cast iron materials for artillery and firecrackers, it was necessary to use charcoal to smelt refined iron, and coal to use iron materials such as other weapons and farm tools.

Qin Chuan rejected this suggestion without hesitation, not only because there was little wood nearby, but also because the calorific value of the charcoal was not enough to burn iron juice with high silicon content.

He's going to use coke.

There is a lot of coal in Montenegro and even in Huanggu Mountain in the west, and he only needs to build a few dry distillation kilns to dry distill coal into coking coal.

Coking coal has the advantages of charcoal, without the disadvantages of coal, and the calorific value is much higher than charcoal, which can meet the temperature requirements of gray iron.

The problem is that there should be people in this era who know how to dry distill coke, but Yan Sanqi doesn't understand it, has never seen a dry distillation kiln, and doesn't know how to build this thing.

Qin Chuan has never seen it, he just learned this kind of paper talk ability in his previous life when he was blowing water in the forum, and in reality, if he is asked to do it, he almost doesn't know anything.

Of course, his advantage is that he has a strong family background, he has money and some people have coal, he can dig as many kilns as he wants, and it doesn't matter how much coal he burns.

He said on the spot that Yan Sanqi could call on the resources of the Black Mountain mine at will, including miners, furnaces, coal and iron ore, and it was no problem to use as much as he wanted.

As long as you can find a way to dry distill coke, it doesn't matter if you hollow out the whole of Montenegro.

After getting Qin Chuan's promise, Yan Sanqi patted his chest on the spot and said that he would definitely get coke out as soon as possible.

Like Chen Zhan, the two ambassadors of the Ordnance Bureau were assigned by Xu Guangqi to assist Sun Yuanhua, one supervised the manufacture of artillery, and the other supervised the manufacture of firecrackers, Qin Chuan allocated the former to Chen Zhan to coordinate the manufacture of artillery, and the latter was solely responsible for the manufacture of firecrackers.

This person's name is Li Xuejing, he is still very young, only about twenty-five or sixteen years old, he is very clever and studious, when Qin Chuan and Chen Zhan and the others were talking, they had been listening quietly by the side.

It wasn't until Qin Chuan roughly arranged the task and faced him that he bowed and said, "Please also ask the chief steward to give advice." ”

"Well said, well said."

Qin Chuan laughed, asked his subordinates to bring a bird gun, put it on the table, and began to describe the firearm he wanted.

He asked for a flintlock pistol.

With the current technical capabilities, mini bullets and rifled guns are not realistic, and it is very difficult to manufacture them on a large scale.

So, let's honestly get flintlock pistols and fixed ammunition first.

It's not that difficult, just remove the fire rope, clip a flint to the beak of the bird, and make a trigger trigger.

It is much easier to set ammunition, it is nothing more than wrapping the rationed ammunition with paper, biting through the paper package before firing, and pouring the ammunition into the fire hole and the chamber respectively.

While listening to Qin Chuan's description, Li Xuejing kept writing and drawing on the paper with charcoal.

After Qin Chuan finished speaking, he looked at the messy paintings again and was silent for a long time.

Qin Chuan didn't bother him, he only called Wang Jizong, made a list of all the craftsmen, and then made a list of some flexible and studious people, and began to allocate manpower to Chen Zhan, Li Xuejing and Zhao Mancai.

These projects are more important than repairing water conservancy, whether it is digging a reservoir or a Guan Dijun who is training, as long as they are on the list, they must immediately report to their respective commanders.

Of course, the treatment of these people has also been improved at the same time, and the monthly income has increased by three to fifty percent.

Qin Chuan did not transfer Mengjiazhuang's manpower to Yan Sanqi because his territory was in Montenegro.

Most of the hungry people who were taken in during this period were sent to the mines, where there are now more than 1,700 people, two blast furnaces are working day and night, and the output of pig iron has increased from three or four thousand catties to about 12,000 catties, a full triple.

Yan Sanqi's task is to use coke to improve iron-making technology, and Qin Chuan is equivalent to handing over the Black Mountain Mine to him to manage, where he can transfer anyone, and the two blast furnaces can also be called at any time, and the priority is higher than Chen Zhan.

So, Yan Sanqi went to the Black Mountain Mine on the same day, and he was accompanied by Song Zhiting, both of whom were executives of the mine.

Yan Sanqi was in charge of technology and production, while Song Zhiting held administrative and financial powers.

In order to leave a good impression on the new owner, Zhao Mancai took a group of bricklayers to the site assigned to him by Qinchuan in the afternoon of the same day and began to build a gunpowder factory.

On the same day, Qin Chuan asked people to build a thatched toilet that collectively urinated and produced nitrate, and sent people to Taiyuan, Fenyang and other places to buy saltpeter, as much as he wanted, anyway, he had silver.

Chen Zhan and Li Xuejing instructed craftsmen to build various facilities in their respective firearms factories, and Chen Zhan couldn't even wait, so he borrowed the furnace and yellow clay from the blacksmith shop on the same day to prepare to make a mold and cast a hollow iron mold.

Qin Chuan was also not idle for a moment, drawing drawings with Chen Zhan, pinching yellow clay, and was busy until late at night.

Villagers in Lou Fan and Jingle also had a busy day, the former digging a reservoir in the mountains from morning to night, and the latter building temporary housing next to the town.

Starting tomorrow, the 1,000 villagers of Jingle will also have to go up the mountain to dig the reservoir.

Qin Chuan felt that by the beginning of spring next year, Lou Fu Town would undergo earth-shaking changes.