Within a few days of the new year, a workshop was erected in the workshop area of the island, and craftsmen came and went to carry materials and quickly set up the shed.

And Yu Xiaotian also put aside other things, drilled into the already built shed, instructed some craftsmen, and built a long furnace in the shed, and outside the shed were some neatly arranged crucibles, these crucibles were just ordered from land, and the size and style were all required by Yu Xiaotian himself.

In addition, there are piles of quartz, silica sand and quicklime, no one knows what Yu Xiaotian is going to do, but no one cares about him, anyway, Yu Xiaotian will have a lot, and he will definitely not be full of tossing, but some people are looking forward to seeing what new things Yu Xiaotian has come up with to open their eyes.

Although Yu Xiaotian was busy with the festival after his wedding a year ago, he did not let go of the things he wanted to make glass mirrors, and if he wanted to make glass mirrors, he had to have glass first.

At the same time, he also asked Mao Shengyuan to find a craftsman on land through a relationship to order a batch of crucibles to be used to fire glass in the future, this crucible is different from the crucible of molten iron, it is sealed, and the ash in the furnace falls into the crucible, affecting the color of the glass.

In the past, after Yu Xiaotian was expelled from university, he used to do a lot of work to make a living, including working for people in a small glass factory.

The production process of that small glass factory is relatively simple, and Yu Xiaotian understood how the glass was fired at a glance, and the raw materials were not a problem.

In fact, the raw materials for firing glass are very simple, but they are some quartz sand, quicklime, and soda ash, first fully crush the raw materials and then calcine them respectively, put them into the crucible and cover them with a lid and start to mix and calcine them in the kiln, and then generate liquid glass, and then decolorize them, you can get liquid glass, and you can make various glass products with liquid glass.

At the beginning, the small glass factory where he worked was relatively backward in terms of craftsmanship and technology, and the glassware produced was not very good, but this was also more suitable for use in this era, so that Yu Xiaotian unexpectedly learned a craft.

So he didn't waste time, and took the time to start working, the shed and the glass furnace were built together, so that the progress of the project was much faster, plus the advance feeding and custom crucibles, and after the shed was in place, it was ready to dry.

The glass kiln for firing glass, Yu Xiaotian painted a scoop than a gourd, according to some things learned by later generations, combined with the current technical conditions, it was modified, and then the soil method was launched, but it didn't take too much to build a glass kiln made of earth to fire liquid glass.

In terms of raw materials, it is easy to solve, Nanri Island itself has limestone, which is calcined into quicklime after being picked, and then matured with water, dried and crushed, sieved and set aside.

Quartz stone is available in many places on land, it is not valuable, you can buy it with a little money, after the quartz stone is broken, it is broken into sand, it becomes quartz sand, after sifting, select the fine quartz sand, wash it with water and dry it can be used, and even the quartz stone was found on Nanri Island during this time, and even the money and events to buy on land can be saved in the future, and you can directly take local materials.

Everything else is easy to say, but at the moment he is most lacking is only the problem of soda ash, with Yu Xiaotian's level and current technology, it is impossible to produce soda ash, so Yu Xiaotian decided to use plant ash to replace soda ash according to his knowledge.

Grass ash is rich in a large amount of potassium carbonate, potassium carbonate is soda ash, when the West fired glass, there was no use of soda ash in the early hundreds of years, and plant ash was also used instead, so there should be no problem.

As for the acquisition of plant ash, there is no need to worry, the island is overgrown with weeds, and some are used for plant ash, but Yu Xiaotian feels that the grass ash burned with seaweed has a greater alkali content and better quality, so he asked some immigrants or the families of fishermen on the island to work, and they went to the beach to collect a large amount of seaweed, stacked it on the beach to dry, and then burned it into plant ash and transported it to the newly built glass field for substitution.

In this way, all kinds of things are basically solved, and it is only necessary for Xiaotian to light the fire and prepare to burn the glass.

Just after the first month, Yu Xiaotian's glass yard was completely built, in addition he also bought a few ships of coal as fuel use, Fujian is not a place where there is a shortage of coal, the south just happens to be only Fujian has coal, concentrated in the Longyan area, the Ming Dynasty has begun to mine a large number of people, so it is not difficult to purchase some coal.

When doing these things, Yu Xiaotian didn't explain in detail to anyone what he was going to do, but just told his subordinates that it was enough to prepare according to his requirements, and he would surprise them when the time came.

So when he lit the glass furnace, no one knew what he was going to do, just a group of craftsmen, stupidly watching Yu Xiaotian directing them to work.

After the furnace was lit, it was burned for two days to dry the furnace thoroughly, and the furnace temperature was also raised, so Yu Xiaotian began to load quartz sand and lime into the crucible and send it to the furnace for calcination.

Originally, Yu Xiaotian was confident, and felt that the problem was not big, but when he first started calcining the raw materials, there was a problem, and soon after putting some crucibles into the furnace, there was an explosion sound in the furnace, which frightened everyone out of the shed, and even Yu Xiaotian was so frightened that he slipped out of the shed, and for a while saw that there was no explosion sound coming out of the furnace, so he carefully took people back to the shed to check.

Yu Xiaotian cried when he saw this, he thought about things a little too simply, and felt that the crucible was not a troublesome thing, but the problem happened to be in the crucible, and most of the crucibles he ordered did not meet the requirements.

Shortly after he put it in the furnace and heated it, more than half of the crucible burst, and his first attempt failed.

So he had to stop work, eliminate the unqualified crucibles, order new crucibles from land, transport them back to heat the test first, and select the usable crucibles to continue the test.

After a month of tossing and turning, the problem of raw materials and crucibles was basically solved, and then he mixed various raw materials into the crucible, covered the lid and put it in the furnace again to start roasting.

After a long time of roasting, the furnace temperature rose to a certain extent, and the raw materials in the crucible began to melt and react, and were gradually burned into molten glass, but after this molten glass was taken out, after testing it, it was found that the color was too heavy, not to mention, and there were many bubbles, such glass was not beautiful even if it was made into glass products, and it was not possible to use glass mirrors at all, and the quality could not even be compared with the glass produced in the West now.

Therefore, if you want to get good glass raw materials, then you must decolorize the glass liquid, Yu Xiaotian thought for a long time before thinking that the glass factory used to use ready-made decolorizing agents to decolorize the glass, and the decolorizing agents seem to be manganese dioxide and sodium nitrate.

But where did he get such chemical raw materials in this era? So he had to find a way to find a replacement to solve the problem.

As for the problem of bubbles, it is easy to solve, add a little salt, as a catalyst, and then by constantly stirring the molten glass, you can send out the bubbles in the molten glass, even if it cannot be completely discharged, as long as the bubbles become very small, difficult to see with the naked eye, it does not affect the use of glass.

Yu Xiaotian racked his brains and thought for a long time, and finally thought that he could only use saltpeter to replace sodium nitrate, so he continued to test it, tossed and turned for another month, and even remodeled the furnace once, and finally got a nearly colorless liquid glass.

Yu Xiaotian looked at the hot glass liquid pulled out by the stirring rod, this time the music blossomed, anyway, he finally succeeded, after the glass liquid dripped down, it condensed into glass beads, and was sent to the annealing kiln for annealing, and the temperature of the province was too fast to cause uneven internal stress cracking of the glass.

In the end, he got a few glass beads that he was close to looking for, and he didn't care that these glass beads were still a little hot, so he grabbed them, and screamed at the heat, but he was reluctant to let go.

When everyone saw these irregular glass beads, they knew what Yu Dao was busy with during this time, and they all looked at the crystal clear glass beads, and their jaws were about to fall to the ground in surprise.

People with a little insight know what this is, like the guards and Zhao Mazi who followed him to the land to run errands, they have seen the world, of course, they know that this is glass.

But people who have never seen the world dare not think that Yu Xiaotian can actually make crystals on the island by himself, and one or two of them regard these glass beads as crystals.

Yu Xiaotian explained to everyone, telling them that this thing is not a crystal, but something that is called glass by the world, but it is different from the kind of glass made by the Chinese, the glass produced in ancient China contains many iron elements, the color is relatively dark, and because the elements contained are different, the color is different, and such colorless glass is not really produced.

However, the Taixi people will produce this kind of glass, but the price is high after selling it to Daming, and Yu Xiaotian specially showed the small mirror given to Lan'er to everyone to see, and everyone knew that such a small thing was worth hundreds of taels of silver, and they were even more shocked that they all gasped.

Think about it again, Yu Xiaotian actually tossed this kind of glass now, if they can produce such a thing on Nanri Island in the future, then the result will be ......

The pupils of the people in the council hall, including the others, immediately turned square, and their eyes were full of stars.

"Ha Lu Ha! Now you know what I'm capable of with someone! In the future, the big guys are waiting to get rich! In addition to making glass mirrors, these glasses can also be made into beautiful cups and saucers vases, and they are still worth the money of the old nose! Yu Xiaotian also showed off his treasure to everyone at this time, and his mouth was almost grinning behind his ears.

"The big boss is really talented! I can't think of anything else that the big boss can't do, haha! But the big boss, how did you get the silver on this glass mirror? Does this big boss also know the way? Wang Hong patted Yu Xiaotian's ass and asked Xiaotian.

"That's natural! But don't say it, don't say it! It's not that I'm worried about you, if it gets out, we won't have to play in the future! It's equivalent to giving money to someone else! Wait, I'll get you this glass mirror when I get back! Of course, Yu Xiaotian would not tell everyone his method now, put on a pretending mysterious posture, waved his hand to let everyone disperse, and plunged into the glass field again.