"Wood?" Yu Xiaotian was stunned for a moment, and said, "How can there be a shortage of wood here?" Aren't there so many piles of wood over there? And according to Commander Fang, there are a lot of camphor trees, pines and fir trees here in Tamsui, so there should be no shortage of wood! ”

Guo Fu smiled when he heard this: "I'm afraid the big boss has forgotten one thing, there is indeed a lot of wood available for shipbuilding here, and the wood stored in the yard is enough to build a lot of ships!"

But the big boss forgot that most of these timbers have just been cut down, and soaked in the water for a while, and they must wait for them to dry before they can be used to build ships, otherwise, the ships made of these wet materials will be deformed and cracked in a few months after launching, and they can only be scrapped if they enter the water in all directions, and they can only be scrapped, so they can't be built with these new materials as a last resort!

Moreover, these flying clippers that the big boss wants us to build are all used as warships, and hard materials must be used!

In the past, in Nanri Island, we mostly used hardwoods from Nanyang and Guangdong, and Tieli wood was the best, even if it was a little second, we had to use lychee wood!

But at present, there are very few hard materials that have been dried here, although a batch of wood has been sent from the source, but it is still out of stock! If you want to wait for the wood here to dry, it will take a year at the earliest, and some big materials will have to be dried for at least two years before they can be used on the ship, so we still have to transport the wood from the outside to build the ship! ”

When Yu Xiaotian heard this, he patted his head, he only cared about letting Guo Fu and them hurry up to build a ship, thinking that the current forest resources on the side of Tamsui are sufficient, and there must be no shortage of wood, but he forgot that the wood used for shipbuilding must be wood after drying, this simple truth, he actually forgot, it is really embarrassing to say it.

So he quickly nodded and smiled: "Hehe! I see, I actually forgot about it! I just thought that there was a lot of wood here and couldn't use it up, but I forgot that this side was all new materials, and I couldn't use it to build ships immediately! Hehe!

I will arrange for the Council Hall to do this immediately, there are still a lot of supplies of lychee wood in Guangdong at the moment, and Tieli wood should be able to buy it as long as it is willing to spend money, and there should be no big problem with the hardwood in Nanyang.

The most important thing at the moment is to be fast, if you lack anything here, immediately notify the council hall, I will explain to the council hall side, and ship it to you as soon as possible!

However, if we have to spend a lot of money to buy a large number of timber from the outside, it is a bit too much!

I think I can build a large drying room for drying wood, and now I think I can do it, and there are several brick kilns nearby, and there is not too much shortage of bricks, so you can find a way to build a large drying kiln to dry wood.

Although some ironwood and lychee wood used in shipbuilding still have to be purchased from the outside for the time being, there are a lot of pine, cypress and fir here, and there are also a lot of camphor wood, all of which are large materials, which can be used locally, saving a lot of transportation capacity and financial resources purchased from outside!

I don't know how to build this drying kiln? ”

After Guo Fu heard this, he quickly nodded and said, "I've seen this little one!" In the past, when the small one was on land, a shipyard built a drying room for drying wet materials!

It's just that the drying room they built is not too big, if we build it here, I'm afraid we have to build a bigger one, and the other one is not enough, you can build a few more drying rooms, so that as long as the wood here has a drying room, it will be almost usable after a month at the slatest! ”

Yu Xiaotian immediately nodded when he heard this: "This is the best, you should do this matter quickly, and strive to build and put into use the drying room before the year, so that we don't need to transport a large number of wood from outside next year!" ”

Now the sea wolf is in Tamsui City, a lot of various projects have been carried out, and the demand for bricks and tiles is increasing, so at the beginning of the early construction of Tamsui Village, the sea wolf began to build a brick kiln on the spot, and found some people who can burn bricks and began to burn bricks and tiles on the spot.

Nowadays, many brick kilns have been built around Tamsui City, and a large number of bricks and tiles are fired every day for use in various construction sites in Tamsui City.

Ancient bricks are fired with the ancient brick kiln, Yu Xiaotian used to be in the old time and space, idle to go to the suburbs to play, once saw a kind of kiln, driven by curiosity, drilled into the inside to see, so how much to understand the structure of this kiln.

This kind of kiln is actually not a new thing in later generations, it is much more backward than the tunnel kiln, but in this era, it is definitely an advanced thing, the biggest advantage is that this kind of kiln can keep burning bricks, the structure is relatively simple, and the efficiency is far more than the earthen kiln used in ancient times, so Yu Xiaotian relied on his memories to probably draw out the structure of this kiln and handed it over to his subordinates to try to explore.

Now, after many trials and tests by some craftsmen, this kind of kiln has basically gradually matured and begun to be put into production.

As a result, the efficiency of firing bricks and tiles here in Tamsui City has been greatly improved, and the bricks and tiles of one furnace have begun to be fired in a steady stream and used on various construction sites.

With this kind of kiln, the demand for bricks and tiles here has been greatly solved, which greatly alleviates the demand for bricks and tiles, and the progress of various projects here has also been greatly improved.

Another issue that must be mentioned is about cement, since Yu Xiaotian occupied Nanri Island, he has been thinking about making cement, an epoch-making building material.

However, Portland cement is not too difficult to produce, and the raw material is relatively easy to obtain, but it requires coal, and the raw material crushing also requires machinery.

So this matter has been put on hold, but after the start of the construction of Tamsui Village, this matter has a certain turnaround, of course, there is no fresh water for coal, and it is not very cost-effective to transport it from Fujian, so it is still unrealistic to want to burn Portland cement.

Yu Xiaotian accidentally met in a migrant village where a dam was built using a stream and a water mill was built at the dam.

So Yu Xiaotian had an idea and had an inspiration, he had considered Portland cement even if he couldn't get it now, but at least he could get some soil cement first.

Soil cement is actually very simple, this thing also has a name, called artificial pozzolana cement, which can be directly crushed into powder with waste bricks and tiles, which can be used, or directly put lime and clay into the kiln for calcination, and the temperature does not need to be too high, it is estimated that there is a six or seven hundred degrees is enough, and it does not need to reach a temperature of more than 1,000 degrees like firing Portland cement.

It is said that during the Anti-Japanese War in China, this method was used to solve the problem of lack of cement, and later after the founding of the People's Republic of China, the local soil method was launched, and it was a large-scale steel smelting, and it was an explosion of agriculture, and this method of soil and cement was also adopted in various places.

When he was in Nanri Island, Yu Xiaotian tried this method, and asked people to use stone grinding to crush some broken bricks and tiles through sieves, and after grinding them into powder, they can indeed solidify when mixed with water, and the strength of course cannot reach the strength of Portland cement, but it can indeed be used.

But the key is to use a stone mill to grind broken bricks and tiles into powder, this matter is too inefficient, at the end of a day, a donkey and a stone mill, a total of dozens of catties of soil and cement can not be produced, and then Yu Xiaotian can only give up.

After seeing the water mill, Yu Xiaotian immediately decided to build more water mills in the streams around Tamsui City, of course, not for rice milling or flour grinding, but all for making soil and cement.

In this way, a water mill can produce 100 catties of soil cement a day, or even more, after a dozen water mills are built, it can produce nearly one or two tons of soil cement a day, as for the raw materials, there are so many brick kilns here in Tamsui City, the bricks and tiles produced will inevitably be broken, these broken bricks and tiles are good raw materials, and now there are two coarse porcelain kilns built here to produce some practical coarse porcelain for local life, reduce the transportation cost of transferring from the land, and when reproducing, Some waste products will also be produced, so these things that were originally useless are transported to grind into powder and made into soil cement, which more or less solves some problems.

It turned out that no one believed that this thing could be used, but after the test, the craftsmen found that this kind of soil cement can indeed be solidified, can play a very good role in the binder, and it is very simple to use, this method made many masons stunned, they didn't expect Yu Xiaotian to be able to use these low-hanging pieces of broken bricks and tiles, to make such a thing that can bond bricks, so it is even more admired for Xiaotian, the big boss, many people think that this matter is a good thing for them, After writing it down, it will be of great use to get it wrong later.

However, Yu Xiaotian is still very dissatisfied with this kind of output, but at the moment he uses water mills or stone grinders, and wants to greatly increase the output, so he can only wait for him to find a way to drum up a set of water conservancy crushing machinery, otherwise before that, even if it is this kind of soil cement, he will not be able to continue to increase the output, even if he has coal, he wants to produce Portland cement, without crushing machinery, it still can't be done.

This incident was then written down by Yu Xiaotian, and he decided that when he had time, he would take the time to find a way to come up with a set of crushing machinery that could greatly improve the quality and output of crushing.

Yu Xiaotian turned around in the shipyard for a while, and saw that the manpower here was relatively sufficient, and the shipwrights of the Nanri Island shipyard were divided into a group, plus a group of apprentices were recently tied from the land, and a group of apprentices were recruited locally, the shipbuilding work here has been fully rolled out, and there is nothing he needs to worry about.

(This year is coming to an end, I don't know how the Spring Festival is going, I wish you all success in the new year, the spirit of Ryoma!)