When there was no project in the imperial court, they often couldn't eat a dry meal for a few days, and many young craftsmen fled because they couldn't stand such exploitation, and only some old craftsmen were in poor health because of their age, so they could only stay in the guard house for a day. Pen × fun × Pavilion www. ｂｉｑｕｇｅ。 ｉｎｆｏ

It took several months of painstaking search among the provincial officials to find more than 1,000 people, most of whom were old craftsmen, and the younger ones had fled to find other ways to make a living.

As long as you are in the craftsman register, you can only be a national craftsman for generations, and you are more like a state slave than the same military household.

This impersonal institutional design is, of course, the work of Emperor Taizu Gao, who simplified all issues, but these disadvantaged groups have not had their own speakers, so no one has been interested in paying attention to this issue for 300 years.

After the craftsmen arrived in Nanjing, Zhu Youhua asked the Ministry of Industry to choose a good address for them to build a large military workshop. The wives and concubines of the artisan households were also equipped with barracks, so that their wives and children could live in peace of mind.

Each old craftsman was given a generous treatment, Zhu Youhua according to their level of craftsmanship, initially divided into three grades, according to the corresponding grade, each person was given a monthly salary of two to four stones, plus eight silver coins to two taels. These are all technical talents, the officials of the DPRK and the Central Committee do not pay attention to these lowly craftsmen, Zhu Youhua is regarded as the top treasure, and when the time is ripe in the future, the unreasonable craftsman household system will also be abolished.

Seeing that the royal family was so generous, these craftsmen bowed their heads again and again, and wept in gratitude. They have been officials and craftsmen for generations, have little freedom, and are hungry and cold on weekdays. I didn't expect that once I was sent by the emperor, there would be blue brick houses, silver money, and other treatment that I couldn't think of, compared to the original cold and starvation, it was simply a paradise on earth that I couldn't yearn for in my life.

Therefore, they cherished everything in front of them, and worked very hard, and there were not enough people, so Zhu Youhua recruited thousands of apprentices on the market, working overtime, and in a few months, the military workshop not only forged tens of thousands of brand-new sharp waist knives, but also made a lot of fine bird guns, tiger squat cannons, gunpowder, iron spear heads, iron armor and other weapons.

Most of the tens of thousands of bird guns that were originally captured, most of the three-eyed guns were made by cutting corners, powerful, and easy to blow up, injuring less enemies and hurting oneself more, which was even worse than chicken ribs, so Zhu Youhua packed them all and sent them to the military workshop for the old craftsman to return to the furnace and rebuild them.

The military workshop is adjacent to the Qinhuai River, built along the river, hundreds of temporary expansion houses, dozens of large factories, covering a large area, just entered, a thick smell of smoke came to the nose, more than a dozen rivers with gates flowed happily, impacting the waterwheel, through the gear transmission, changing the direction of the force, flowing into the squares.

Zhu Youhua came to the military workshop in plain clothes, and the owners of the workshops came forward to pay respects, and after the salute, Zhu Youhua let them settle down in their places, and did not have to wait, and then went straight into the iron-smelting workshop not far away.

In Zhu Youhua's sight, a forging hammer was driven by hydraulic power, striking the red-hot wrought iron at a uniform speed and force, and a rough-looking, shirtless blacksmith next to him was scooping a spoonful of liquid pig iron with an iron spoon with a wooden handle and pouring it on the wrought iron. Zhu Youhua could see at a glance that this was the steel filling method passed down from Qi Wuhuaiwen.

In his impression, although the steel filling method is good, it is not as good as the Suzhou steel method in the previous life.

In line with the idea of improving the efficiency and quality of iron-making, Zhu Youhua called an old blacksmith named Ding Er, the head of the iron-smelting workshop, and half-recalled to teach them the general principles of the Suzhou Iron and Steel Method.

The old blacksmith followed closely behind Zhu Youhua and listened carefully.

"When I was studying before, I saw a new method of iron smelting, first of all, we must prepare a blast furnace, the shape of the blast furnace is like an inverted vase, with wrought iron as the material iron, placed in the furnace, the pig iron plate is placed at the mouth of the furnace, the furnace temperature rises to the pig iron plate when the pig iron plate begins to melt, use the fire tongs to clamp the pig iron plate to move left and right, and constantly turn the iron, so that the iron is evenly poured into the pig iron liquid, so that the iron can be carburized, and the iron and slag can be separated, and the refined iron with less slag and uniform composition can be produced.

I also inadvertently learned of this new type of iron smelting technique, and the specific method still needs to be explored by myself, so I will refine a few key points, one is that charcoal can be used to refine coke in imitation of charcoal, and the furnace temperature can be increased with coke, and the second is to use a blower with a good degree of closure, fresh air will enter, pig iron will be more easily dissolved, iron and slag will be separated more thoroughly, and even fine iron can be produced without forging. ”

The Sugang method was still in application before the liberation of the previous life, and its influence was far-reaching. However, Zhu Youhua also knows a rough idea of this, and the principle of small blast furnace soil steelmaking is also something that he accidentally saw when he was in the library in college in his previous life, which was impressive, but not profound. So he didn't dare to command blindly, and left the craftsmen to explore on their own.

Ding Laojiang was respectful in front of him, and did not dare to have the slightest rebuttal, and he did write down the emperor's words in his heart, planning to give it a try after the emperor left, to see if it was really feasible.

Adjacent to the ironworks is the Armor Workshop. As soon as I entered, I heard the sound of "ding ding dong" forging endlessly, Zhu Youhua only watched quietly on the side under the personal protection of more than a dozen guards, the emperor had been in the military workshop several times, and the military craftsmen knew his temperament, practical and courteous, so when he saw the emperor coming, he still looked focused on making armor, and was very respectful when he looked up and met the emperor's sight.

The pinnacle of Chinese armor belongs to the Buren armor of the Northern Song Dynasty, which is composed of more than 1,800 armor leaves, which are made of leather strips or nails and cast. Coarsely ground. There are many processes such as piercing and fine grinding, and it is necessary to make masks, and to wrap leather around the neckline, cuffs, etc., to prevent hanging damage to clothes and skin. It takes nearly a month for craftsmen to make a suit of armor.

Zhu Youhua didn't have any good ideas on this, and it was also very difficult to make chain mail in the West at the same time, and it took several months to make a pair of chain mail, and after the rise of Western plate armor, it would take a month to build ordinary plate armor.

Fortunately, there is no shortage of raw materials, manpower and technology in the workshop, the armor-making capacity is still considerable, and more than 400 pairs of iron armor can be produced a month under the full effort, and the production process of leather armor and cotton armor is relatively simple, and more than 1,000 pairs can be produced every month, but compared to the 30,000 imperial battalion pro-army, it is not possible to do the whole army with armor for the time being, and there are no less than 15,000 imperial battalion soldiers can only wear mandarin duck battle jackets wrapped with iron nets, and they want the whole army to be equipped with cotton armor and leather armor, and it will take at least more than a year to match the whole army with iron armor. According to the current scale of the military workshop, it will take at least five years, and perhaps the scale of the workshop will be expanded in the future, and the raw materials and funds will be sufficient, so it may be possible to shorten the time.

At present, the armor rate of the imperial camp pro-army is about fifty percent, and the armor rate of the whole army in the four towns of Jiangbei and Zuo Town is about two to three percent, as for other small military towns and local town troops, the armor rate is even lower, almost less than one percent, only the family of the general deputy general can wear all the armor, and most of the others are only a worn-out mandarin duck battle jacket, which is almost a cannon fodder, which is really shabby.

Not to mention anything else, the strength gap of the Ming and Qing armies can be roughly seen from the armor rate alone, the Qing army's fifty or sixty thousand Manchu Eight Banner soldiers have reached a perverted ten percent, the iron cotton armor is the majority, strong and lightweight, there are a lot of iron armor, many even put on two or three layers of iron armor when they are in battle, almost a mobile human-shaped tank, other Mongolian Eight Banners, Han Eight Banners have a lower armor rate, but they have also reached five or six percent, mainly cotton armor, leather armor, in the field, used to deal with the ordinary Ming army with less than one percent armor rate, almost a one-sided slaughter.