Everyone subconsciously looked at Li Ke, a furnace of iron is 5,000 tons, how much steel do you want Datang to refine in a year? What's up? At that time, the houses will be built with iron, the official roads will be built with iron, and the carriages will also be made of iron, right?

Do you still want to build an iron kite to the sky?

The main reason is that Li Ke's predetermined goal is too outrageous, everyone is just 20 tons of iron in a furnace, which is unimaginable in their opinion, and then increase this efficiency by 250 times...... At that time, the whole world will be Datang's.

"So, does the ironworks have to be relocated to Chencang?" Li Shimin looked at Li Ke and asked.

"Yes, this is a must, because there will be a large number of supporting industries with the steel plant in the future, so this place is too close to the current Chang'an City, and it is not very convenient."

"In the future, it is very likely that the number of people around Chang'an will continue to increase, which is one of the reasons why I will let people move all the surrounding cemeteries."

"In the future, the walls of Chang'an City may become a place to enjoy the scenery." Li Ke smiled.

Li Shimin rolled his eyes, what nonsense are you talking about? The city walls become a place to enjoy the scenery? Why don't you send someone to collect a fee?

"Anything else?" Li Shimin asked.

"Yes, let's go and see where the industrial machine tool is made." Li Ke smiled and said.

"What is an industrial machine tool?" Li Ke's mouth often popped up with new things, and as the secretary of the Ministry of Industry, Duan Lun felt that he had to understand the Tao as soon as possible.

"An industrial machine is a machine that produces machines." Li Ke thought for a while and gave them a general explanation, "I'll make an inappropriate analogy, for example, a carpenter has tools such as saws, chisels, hammers, and planers. ”

"When we put these tools together on a machine, when the cut tree passes over the tool, it goes from a log to a piece of formwork, and this machine brings together all the functions of these tools."

"And if we call these tools machines, then the industrial machine is the machine that produces this kind of machine."

"This kind of machine we call a machine tool, it is to concentrate different processes into the same assembly line, so that one machine has a variety of processing capabilities, and has a high precision."

"The products they produce have the potential to be almost identical within a certain range, and that's the charm of industrialization."

Li Ke's explanation was already very clear, but everyone was still a little confused, it didn't matter if they were confused, Li Ke took them directly to the machine tool factory.

The machine tool is a bit like a robot, in some science fiction novels, intelligent programs make a robot, and then start to make robots through robots.

In fact, the machine tool is also possible, you can build a machine tool to manufacture machine tool parts, and then assemble it, which is a new machine tool.

Of course, there are not many types of machine tools in Datang now, mainly machine tools that produce various parts for steam engines.

With them, Li Ke soon arrived at the Datang No. 1 Machine Tool Manufacturing Factory, which is different from the previous steel factory, several steam engines are driving the machine, and then the workers operate the scale on the machine next to set the relevant data, and then one by one the steel molds begin to be cut.

Watching the steel being cut into different shapes like ordinary wood, Li Shimin and the others were once again shocked to feel the charm of industry.

Similar parts were either hammered out by molds or by blacksmiths before Datang. The former is very accurate, but the parts made from the mold are likely to have a poor life due to the substandard quality of the steel.

Although Datang did not have many parts that needed high-strength steel before.

But now, these are processed directly from special steel, and the speed of processing is simply god-fast in their opinion, which is faster than some carpenters process wood, right? Is this still the same incredibly hard steel?

After the parts are made, they will be continuously transported forward through a conveyor belt driven by a steam engine, and then on both sides of the conveyor belt, some workers will inspect these parts and pick out the unqualified parts inside.

In the end, the parts are neatly put together.

Although it cannot be compared with the assembly line operation controlled by real CNC machine tools in later generations, the efficiency may be dozens or hundreds of times lower. But for the current Datang, this speed is already very terrifying.

The parts are eventually transported to an assembly plant, where they are assembled by workers.

"What is this machine made for?" Li Shimin looked at the machine and asked.

"Your Majesty, what is being made now is a machine tool for making the balls in the bearings for final polishing." The director of the machine tool plant immediately replied.

"Balls?" Li Shimin was a little curious.

There are samples here, and soon someone took a few balls and showed them to Li Shimin, mainly two kinds, one is the most used cylindrical ball, and the other is a spherical ball.

In fact, there are many types of ball bearings, such as deep groove ball bearings, angular contact ball bearings, cylindrical roller bearings, tapered roller bearings, self-aligning ball bearings, self-aligning roller bearings, thrust ball bearings, thrust cylindrical roller bearings, needle roller bearings, etc.

At present, many of these bearings cannot be made by Datang, and the accuracy of the manufacturing is not so high, but the model is available.

In fact, these cast rollers are not as accurate as later generations, and their life span naturally cannot be compared with later generations, but with them, it is too helpful to Datang.

Here there are not only rollers, but also complete bearings.

Seeing the bearings stuffed with cylindrical rollers turning at a very high speed in the hands of the craftsmen, all the ministers immediately thought of their updated carriages.

The wheels of these carriages are somehow much smoother than the previous wooden wheels, and it is clear that this is the bearing of the character.

"These bearings can be used in almost all aspects of industry, for example, some heavier objects can also use large rollers and bearings to rotate and move, for example, we have seen large bearings under the large molten steel furnace in the steel mill."

"In the future, these bearings may be used in any field we know, and this is just a trip for industry." Li Ke smiled and introduced it to everyone.

After visiting the industrial machine factory, Li Ke took them to see the printing factory, paper mill and other factories.

It wasn't until the sun went down that Li Ke arranged a meal in the canteen of the textile factory he visited last.

Before eating, Li Ke secretly greeted Li Shimin, and Li Shimin naturally understood.