A new day is coming, and Su Yan's task today is to open up an area with his clansmen to build an earthen blast furnace.

Where to build the earthen blast furnace is a question that needs to be considered, Su Yan led the people to walk towards the big river first, walked to the big river and then turned to the north, until leaving the planting area of the dragon tribe and entering the jungle area that has not yet been cultivated, this area is located in the northeast of the dragon tribe's residence, about seven or eight hundred meters apart, Su Yan is going to build the earth blast furnace here, adjacent to the river and the jungle.

The construction of the earthen blast furnace for smelting copper ore in this place adjacent to the river and the jungle had Su Yan's own considerations.

Charcoal is needed to smelt copper ore, a lot of wood is needed to burn charcoal, and the jungle can provide a lot of wood, and several brick kilns can be rebuilt in this area to burn charcoal.

The construction of earthen blast furnaces and brick kilns requires a lot of clay and water, which can be easily found by the river, not to mention the water resources, and the river does not dry up even in dry years.

Another point is that when smelting copper ore in the soil blast furnace, it is necessary to blow air into the earth blast furnace, or add oxygen to make the charcoal in the earth blast furnace fully burn to reach a higher temperature to melt the copper in the ore.

Blowing air into the earth blast furnace, when the small blast furnace built before smelting three pieces of copper ore, Su Yan asked a clansman to fan the wind with a fan, which was relatively inefficient.

When building a taller and larger earthen blast furnace, it is impossible to use a fan to fan the wind all the time, which is too inefficient, and must be replaced with special blast equipment, such as the Chinese wisdom crystallization - bellows.

Not to mention the difficulty of making the bellows, just pushing and pulling the bellows back and forth by hand is also a force job, and no one can pull the bellows for a long time, so Su Yan thought of hydraulic equipment and used water power to pull the bellows, even if the bellows pushed and pulled back and forth no matter how hard it was, it was not a problem under the action of hydraulic power.

Thinking of using water power to push and pull the bellows, Su Yan also thought of other hydraulic equipment.

This year, the dragon tribe planted millet on a large scale, and in autumn it was able to harvest thousands of catties of millet, leaving a part of the millet as seeds for the next year, and the rest of the millet could be eaten as food, but there is one thing to note, a small grain of millet is husked.

If you don't remove the husk of the millet, the millet will not be able to swallow, so you must remove the husk of the millet before eating it.

In ancient China, there is a word, rice (grain), that is, the process of hulling the beaten millet, the husk is rice bran, which can be used to feed livestock, and the rest of the husked millet is eaten by people.

But at the very beginning, the rice was very tired, people could only use their hands to hold the mallet and smash the rice bran one by one, and the women had to scrap their arms because of the long time the rice was old, and even the rice was used as a punishment in the Qin Dynasty, which shows the difficulty of the rice.

Later, people improved their technology a little and turned to stepping on the rice with their feet, which was a little easier, but it would still make people tired, until people learned to use water machinery to make rice, and replace manpower with water, and the rice would never make people tired again.

The name of this hydraulic machine is called 水碓 (duì), which is one of the simpler types of hydraulic machinery.

The power machinery of the water mill is a large vertical water wheel, the wheel is equipped with a number of plate blades, and the rotating shaft is equipped with some staggered paddles, the paddle is used to pluck the rod, each pole is erected with a wooden pole, and one end of the rod is equipped with a conical stone. The rice to be processed is placed in the stone mortar below, and the flowing water hits the water wheel to make it rotate, and the paddle mortar on the shaft moves the tip of the mill rod so that the mill head falls to the ground together to carry out the rice.

In addition to the water mill, there are also some hydraulic tools such as stone mills, water mills, hydraulic blower devices, water drains, etc., which are used to replace manpower with water power, making a certain work easier or reducing manpower.

The idea of manufacturing hydraulic machinery has taken root in Su Yan's mind, but it will take time to make each piece of hydraulic machinery, and the biggest problem is tools, metal tools, such as knives, saws, axes, nails, etc.

The absence of metal tools does not mean that hydraulic machinery cannot be manufactured, but the use of stone tools is very inefficient compared to metal tools, and the efficiency difference between the two is more than ten times.

So it all started with smelting the copper.

Mining copper ore and smelting copper ore are the two most important things for the Dragon Tribe at present, except for fishing, and everything else has to make way for these two things, so that the Dragon Tribe can smelt copper in batches as soon as possible.

The construction of the tiled house was temporarily stopped, anyway, the current tiled house was enough to live in all the people of the Xialong tribe, and all the fired adobe bricks were used to build the earthen blast furnace and brick kiln.

Su Yan led the people to clean up the area selected to build an earthen blast furnace and a brick kiln, and first used a net to surround it, the area was less than two acres of land, and the space was not enough to continue to expand.

The next step is to clear the area of plants, weeds and shrubs are all pulled out, and trees are also cut down so that they can be used for charcoal.

It's easier to pull out weeds and shrubs, but it's more laborious to cut down trees, and it's also very laborious to cut down a tree the size of a child's waist with a stone axe, but fortunately, half of the selected area has no tall trees.

When the tribesmen were busy cleaning up the plants, Su Yan was also busy, the tribesmen were manual labor, and Su Yan was mental labor, and Su Yan was designing the earthen blast furnace.

The structure of the brick kiln is simple, it is difficult to make too many changes, the structure of the soil blast furnace should be well designed, and there are many parts that need to be designed.

"I was just a Chinese medicine practitioner in my previous life, why do I want to work as a designer now?" Su Yan complained helplessly.

Spit and complain, Su Yan has to continue to design the earthen blast furnace, this matter can only come by himself, other clansmen can't help at all, it can be said that Su Yan single-handedly made the dragon tribe make great strides in development, new technologies are brought by Su Yan, the clansmen can only learn, they haven't learned yet, how can they improve on the basis of these technologies? Not to mention creating something new.

The small furnace built when smelting the three pieces of copper ore was less than one meter high, and it was only experimental in nature, Su Yan's newly designed earthen blast furnace reached a height of two meters, and the diameter of the bottom reached one meter, and the diameter gradually shrank when it was built from the bottom to the top, and the minimum diameter at the top was expected to reach 0.6 meters.

Su Yan took a piece of black charcoal and wrote and drew on a large stone slab, and the structural diagram of an earthen blast furnace slowly plumped up.