Shi Qinjie stood in the newly built timber processing factory by the Coconut Tree Creek Reservoir in the east of the city, carefully observing the factory that was run by some technicians who relied on local support. The vast majority of the management and technical personnel in the factory were native outsiders, a small number were recruited from the local Irish immigrants, and the general workers were served by Eight Banner slaves or Malay slaves.

The wood processing plant is divided into two parts: processing workshop and drying workshop. At present, only a small temporary drying kiln, about three meters high, has been built in the drying plant, using the smoke drying method that has been eliminated on the east coast. The timber is stacked on top of each other and then burned over a low fire at the bottom of the pile, drying the wood by the heat of the flue gas generated by the combustion. This method not only slows down the drying speed and does not dry evenly enough, but also easily causes fire and environmental pollution.

At present, this "backward" technology has been eliminated in the local area, and it has been replaced by a more advanced tunnel smoking and drying method. That is, many rectangular brick flues are set up around the inner side of the drying kiln wall, and the flue is covered with holes above the flue. During production, fuel is put into the flue to burn, and then the wood is dried by the combustion smoke. It can be seen that this method of drying wood is not fundamentally different from the previous one, and its advantage is that the wood pile is completely out of contact with the open flame, and the wood is heated and dried by heating the moist air acting as a medium in the kiln, so that the possibility of fire is greatly reduced.

However, when Xinhuabao was working on the project, the new local technicians suggested to Shi Qinjie to use the waste heat from the brick kiln to dry the wood. They believe that the lack of coal and the hot and humid weather in the new Huaxia region make it difficult to collect dry firewood and grass fuel. In addition, the traditional drying kiln requires a large number of feeders and stokers. Therefore, it is not very suitable for the new China region with a lack of labor.

It just so happens that the production capacity of small clay kilns being used outside Xinhuabao is relatively limited. After several months of erosion in the rainy season, the original clay kiln body was damaged, and under the interweaving of various factors, Shi Qinjie was ready to start construction of a large-scale brick-making wheel kiln at the end of the rainy season in April to solve the above problems once and for all.

The kiln is similar to the kiln built in the early days of the local area, and if it is produced normally, it is not a problem to produce more than 15 million standard bricks per year (there are three wheel kilns in the local area, each with an annual output of 36 million standard bricks, and more than 2,000 workers, including slave laborers). But that's a lot of capacity. The number of workers needed is definitely not small, and Pei Suning, who presided over the construction of the brick kiln factory, bluntly told him that about four or five hundred people may be needed. Because the number of skilled workers needed to make bricks every day is a huge number, at this time, Shi Qinjie really misses the automatic brick making machine in the 21st century. It is said that the local area is already researching this kind of machinery, but it is not urgent, and it seems that Xinhuabao still needs a lot of manpower to make bricks by hand for the time being.

According to the local data parameters, the new kiln can produce about 6,000-8,000 cubic meters of exhaust flue gas per hour, and the temperature is about 80-100 degrees. The ignition point of wood is 250-300°C, which is just right for drying wood. According to estimates. This flow of waste heat is more than enough to dry two kilns with a capacity of fifty or sixty cubic meters (referring to the capacity of wood). According to the calculation that it takes an average of six days to dry a batch of wood, there is no problem in drying more than 5,000-6,000 cubic meters of wood per year. So much wood. It is enough to build a few battleships, not to mention the main merchant ship manufacturing here in the future, and perhaps, the new Chinese colony can also export a certain amount of shipbuilding timber to China in the future.

Of course, the Navy is more picky, and the stubborn-minded guys currently accept only wood that is dried in the shade by special means for the manufacture of battleship hulls, and refuse to use any drying kiln for quick drying of wood, on the grounds that the quality of the dried wood is unreliable. Therefore, in the future, the timber exported to China will have to be used to build merchant ships and fishing boats in the two local shipyards, and if it is not possible, it can also be used by the local timber processing factories to make horse-drawn carriages, tools, furniture, gun butts and other parts.

Regarding this suggestion put forward by the technicians, Shi Qinjie only thought about it for a while and readily agreed. There is no way, unlike the local Ping'an Coal Mine, which has a steady supply of coal from the local coal mine, like burning bricks, the slaves can only collect firewood and grass to dry and burn. The only locally transported coal was also used in lime kilns and cement kilns to burn lime and cement. It can be said that Shi Qinjie's permission will not be obtained if it is not necessary to develop any energy-intensive industries in the new Huaxia area, so this time the technicians proposed to use the waste heat exhausted from the brick kiln factory to dry the wood, which is really his appetite, without him, mainly to save a lot of fuel.

Although construction is not convenient during the rainy season, the timber processing plant still takes advantage of the rare sunny weather during the rainy season to erect many wooden canopies on the already well-leveled land. Recently, due to the large amount of bricks occupied by the construction of the city wall, the timber processing factory has been allocated a very small quota, about less than 2,000 yuan a day, so the progress has not been fast. For this reason, the person in charge of the factory began to sigh bitterly when Shi Qinjie came to inspect, complaining about the lack of building materials, and the difficulty of completing the task on time.

The person in charge of the factory complained that Shi Qinjie knew very well that if they failed to complete the task, they would be assessed by themselves, and complaining to themselves at this time could be regarded as a preventive vaccination in advance. Shi Qinjie also laughed at this matter, and revealed it, after all, this matter is really not to blame.

However, when it comes to the lack of red bricks, it is indeed a major problem restricting the development of Xinhuabao today. According to the output of the existing small earthen kiln (an annual output of 3.5 million pieces), this brick is really not enough, not to mention anything else, this city wall is a super big consumer of bricks. Shi Qinjie calculated that if the city wall under construction was built without a large amount of stone and all the existing large city wall bricks (four times the size of standard bricks), the city wall would consume about 26,000 bricks per meter. This consumption is staggering, and the number of bricks produced in the local area of Langdao is nearly 110 million bricks per year, but it is still insufficient. No, the walls of several new settlements that have been built in the past two years have either not been completed, or they have been built with small castles of only a few hundred meters, and this is still due to the heavy use of a mixture of stone and wood.

Therefore, instead of relying on the transportation of bricks from the mainland (200,000 standard bricks per transport ship), the construction of Xinhua Fort should be based on its own vigorous local brick burning. The construction of the River Fort in South Africa is a good example, Mo Ming and Liu Ang used the bricks transported from the local area to set up several small earthen kilns, and then drove a large number of natives to quarry, so that at the beginning it was only a small castle, and then after several expansions after the surplus of building materials, it has the current appearance.

"What a headache." Shi Qinjie is also a little anxious, who made the automatic brick making machine still not able to get it out? If the slaves here were to make bricks by hand, even if they were allowed to work 14 hours a day, that person would be able to make one or two hundred bricks a day, not to mention that the clumsy slaves at the beginning would probably not be able to achieve such a high labor efficiency. Moreover, the capacity of the current small clay kiln is also limited, it can burn more than 30,000 bricks at a time, and it takes three days to burn once, and the annual output is only three or four million pieces a year, which is not enough to fill the gaps.

"It seems that the matter of the last wheel kiln should be hurried." Shi Qinjie thought to himself, "Well, work will start as soon as the rainy season is over." The bricks burned for the next period of time had to be saved, and the batch of refractory bricks that had been shipped this time had to be kept. The original planned wheel kiln with an annual output of 15 million standard bricks seems to be conservative, and it is best to keep up with the local one, with an annual output of 30 or 40 million pieces, so that I will have the bottom of what I do. Next, the city walls, houses, docks, water conservancy and irrigation facilities, forts and even factories should not be used. I'm so worried, and I don't know how the turtles of those European countries build a base in each colony. Could it be that in the beginning, like those natives, they should first build thatched huts and wooden huts and deal with them for a year or two? Or did they drive a large number of local slaves to open the mountains and quarry to build houses? ”

After looking at the drying workshop, Shi Qinjie walked to the processing workshop next door. It's a lackluster place, with some local carpenters and a group of newly recruited apprentices working on logs. After the logs are harvested from the logging camps in the mountains upstream, they are debranched, leafed and peeled on the spot, and the remaining logs are then pulled by slaves down the river to the processing plant, where they are neatly stacked under a canopy to wait for the carpenters in the workshop to moisturize, embalm and insecticide.

Along the banks of the reservoir, several simple wooden hydraulic sawing machines and hydraulic carpentry lathes have been installed in the workshop, which are the tools that carpenters will need to process wood in the future. Unfortunately, the most advanced local steam sawing machines and steam woodworking lathes are still absolutely forbidden to flow into any overseas colonies at this stage, and it is difficult for anyone to greet them. As a result, these local carpenters continue to use the "outdated" equipment they had used for many years to process wood.

After seeing the wood processing factory, Shi Qinjie gave a little advice, and then walked towards the office in the city with an umbrella surrounded by guards. (To be continued......)