DaGreen Lotus Peas@nt Girl

Chapter 136 - 149

Chapter 136

Wang Xiao Si took Liu Yun to the bicycle workshop, where Liu Yun saw for the first time how bicycles were made.

What attracted him most was the heavy and huge punching machine.

Bang bang - with just one stroke, even the ground was shaking, and at the same time the metal ball blank was punched into a perfect sphere.

What kind of brain could have come up with this?

When they arrived at the blacksmith's shop, Liu Yun's horizons were further broadened.

What a variety there was - windows, drills, grinders, milling machines, steam engines...so many different things that Liu Yun's eyes were dazzled.

"Young Master Si, it's dangerous here, go play somewhere else."

Xia Xian now had five apprentices, all clever young men selected from the villagers of He Wan village. After learning for a month they could get the hang of things, which made life a lot easier for Xia Xian.

Right now he was taking a few of them to a newly built large workshop nearby, to help test an "automated" production line.

Of course, they were only responsible for the work itself, the specifics of the testing were handled by the owner.

Soon Li Yao came over, and since Liu Yun was here, she took him along to watch and help out.

The main product of this new workshop was ceramic tiles.

But don't think ceramic tiles are easy to make, just compress some mud, apply some glaze, and fire - that's far from the truth.

The production process for ceramic tiles was quite complex, and making it semi-automated was even more complicated. Li Yao had already spent over a month soaking in this workshop to debug the production line.

First were the raw materials.

The main ingredients for ceramic tiles were potter's clay, kaolin, and loess.

Near Guihua Village in Baichuan County there was a large deposit of kaolin, also known as Guanyin clay, which was very convenient for Li Yao. She had already reached an agreement with Guihua Village for them to organize the mining of kaolin, which would be transported directly to her in the future.

In addition, quartz and feldspar were needed.

These three main raw materials were mixed together in proportion and ground into an extremely fine powder, which required the first row of large machines in the workshop - ball mills.

The principle of ball mills was simple: an array of steel balls were placed inside a horizontal cylindrical chamber. The raw materials and water were added, the door closed, and the chamber was rotated at a constant speed by a water wheel.

After a period of time, the raw materials and water would be ground into a mud thinner than a strand of hair.

The mud was poured out and passed through a magnetic separator to remove any iron fragments, then pumped into a 10-meter tall iron tank and dried with hot air blasts to obtain the basic powdered raw material.

Just this one process took up half the workshop.

Looking at these hulking steel contraptions, Liu Yun was at a loss for words to describe his shock, and could only exclaim "What amazing gadgets!"

What Li Yao came to debug today was a hydraulic press, the machine responsible for compressing the powdered materials into blank ceramic tiles.

A row of thick steel molds were installed on a conveyor belt, which would be filled with the fine ceramic powder after passing through a hopper.