Chen Xian, who stayed in Xizhuangzi, took advantage of this time to start the development of the ball mill.

The principle of the ball mill is not complicated, that is, the raw materials that need to be crushed are loaded into the drum together with some iron balls of different sizes, and then the drum is rotated to let the iron balls and materials roll together and collide with each other, and finally achieve the purpose of crushing the materials.

Chen Xian drilled some very small holes in the drum to sift out the cement powder that had been ground.

Chen Xian also has a plan for the manufacture of ball mills, and he plans to use the iron binding machine to tie some seven or eight millimeters thick iron plates, and process these iron plates into arc shapes through simple hydraulic rounding equipment.

The principle of the rounding machine is very simple, that is, with three linkage rollers, generally one above and two below, the iron plate that needs to be rounded is put between the upper and lower two groups of rollers, and the linkage rollers are rotated, and the upper and lower two groups of rollers can press the iron plate into an arc shape.

The difficulty of this kind of machine is that it needs to roll out arc-shaped plates of different diameters by adjusting the three rollers, but Chen Xian obviously does not need such a complex machine, he can completely fix the position of the three rollers, and can only roll out an arc-shaped plate.

If you don't need to adjust, this machine is simple, three casting rollers, three casting gears, plus a water turbine as power, it's OK, and the difficulty is not at all more difficult than the iron tie machine.

After the arc plate is processed, riveting holes are drilled around it.

After the drilling is completed, the smelter is carburized and quenched.

Next, these arc plates can be spliced together into a large cylinder.

The splicing adopts the riveting method, drills riveting holes around the arc plate, and then splices these arc plates piece by piece with red-hot forging rivets, and finally obtains a large drum with a diameter of more than one meter and a length of more than five meters.

The forged rivets are passed through the riveting holes, and the small ends of the rivets are flattened by taking advantage of the red heat, and the two iron plates can be connected, and the red hot rivets will shrink after cooling, and the two iron plates will be tightly connected together.

At the end of the eighteenth century, before the advent of the electric welding machine, the steam engine boiler and the hull of the ironclad ship were spliced in this way.

The central shaft of the drum is processed by casting, and the boss and mounting hole for installation are reserved during casting, and the support cover plate at both ends and the internal support partition are spliced with forged plates.

Finally, the drum is mounted on two huge cement piers, and the plain bearings of the rollers (without balls, the resistance is relatively large) are embedded in the cement piers.

The power of the drum is provided by a separate water turbine.

Finally, a large number of pig iron balls of various sizes are cast into the drum.

The working principle of the ball mill is not difficult, and it is not troublesome to make, so the first ball mill trial-made by Chen Xian was a success.

This ball mill can process more than 2,000 catties of cement at a time, and more than 5,000 catties a day.

Naturally, this efficiency cannot be compared with a real ball mill, but it is also ten times stronger than the water mill and grinding groove.

With the ball mill, crushing is no longer a bottleneck in cement production, but the firing efficiency of cement begins to lag behind.

Chen Xian also made some improvements to the cement kiln.

He thickened the diameter of the cement kiln and built a brick house outside the cement kiln, the first floor of the brick house is the cement kiln combustion chamber, the second floor is the kiln room for firing cement, and the third floor is the preheating chamber.

The cement material is first transported directly up to the third floor via a ramp outside the building, where it is loaded into a drawer-style preheating chamber and pushed into the furnace cavity for preheating.

After the preheating is completed, the drawer-type preheating bin will be pulled out as a whole and sent to the second floor through the pulley lifting platform, and the workers will push the preheated materials and the preheating bin into the firing kiln for calcination.

After the cement is burned, it is again transported to the first floor by a pulley lifting platform, where workers unload the material into a cart and send it for grinding.

On the first floor of the cement workshop is the combustion chamber, from which workers add dyes to the kiln, and on this floor there are two organ-style blower equipment, driven by a water turbine and a cam, for uninterrupted micro-kiln blasting.

In terms of material crushing, Chen Xian strengthened the use of gunpowder mining on the one hand, and built a water-fire crushing furnace on the other hand.

The name sounds lofty, but in fact it is a furnace where large blocks of limestone are heated, and when the temperature is sufficient, the platform where the stones are placed is pulled out of the furnace through the slide rails, and the stones are pushed into the pool next to them, and the stones are blown up by themselves.

After these improvements, the output of Chen Xian's cement plant has increased greatly, a kiln, a ball mill, can produce five or six thousand catties of cement a day!

Chen Xian began to choose a site near the river around Yiyuan, and built five cement factories in one go, and among these cement factories, there are always more than thirty or forty cement kilns!

……

Not long after the fifteenth day of the first month of the third year of Da'an, Wanyan Pingtao personally came to Laiwu County with two thousand cavalry, one person and two horses.

Chen Xian met with Wanyan Pingtao on the Lianhe River between Laiwu County and Hejiazhuang.

Compared with more than a year ago, today's Wanyan Pingtao is much more mature and stable, and there are also a lot of vicissitudes.

For more than a year of guarding the border, the pride of Wanyan Pingtao's nobles in the country was completely destroyed, in exchange for full of sorrows.

Wanyan Pingtao was able to come to Laiwu in person this time because he used his connections to transfer back to Dongping from Changzhou.

Although Wanyan Pingtao was worried about the country, he did not have the consciousness of sacrificing his life as cannon fodder for the country, so when he found that the northern frontier defense was likely to be unable to stop the Mongols, he began to use his connections to escape from the quagmire.

On the occasion of leaving Changzhou, Wanyan Pingtao once again bribed the pastoral supervisor with a lot of money, and got more than 2,000 war horses, all of which were brought to Laiwu, on the one hand, he planned to exchange another batch of armor and flying sand cannons from Chen Xian.

Chen Xian's flying sand cannon was slightly weaker than the cannon he built, but it was much lighter.

But more importantly, Wanyan Pingtao wants to recruit Chen Xian.

Although Wanyan Pingtao's father and most Dongping Mansion officials only regarded Chen Xian as a bandit, Wanyan Pingtao, who had fought with Chen Xian, did not see it that way.

After meeting with Chen Xian, the two quickly negotiated the transaction price, because they wanted to attract Chen Xian, so Wanyan Pingtao didn't care too much about the price, so he traded at the last price.

After talking about business, Wanyan Pingtao proposed Zhao'an to Chen Xian and promised a lot of conditions.

But Chen Xian blocked him back with a word, "The contemptible people are very happy in this Lu Mountain, but they are not interested in being a slave to others." ”

Hearing what Chen Xian said, Wanyan Pingtao naturally knew that there was nothing to talk about in this matter.

When Yan Pingtao left, he almost emptied Chen Xian's armor inventory and took away more than two hundred flying sand cannons.

Most of the armor was replaced by Chen Xian when he changed the plate armor for his subordinates.

With an iron rolling machine, it is much more efficient to make plate armor than to make zaga.

However, Chen Xian naturally will not stop producing Zaga, which is the fist product of his foreign trade.