13

26th April 1574

"As you can see, sir, there are two chambers and three circular shields inside the new kind of steam horse. The bottom chamber is where all the work happens, while the upper one is there only to control and automate the process."

After brutally smashing apart the clay form, I picked the iron cast product out of it. With just one more moment of waiting, all the other parts in the form of the pistons or pipes were picked out of their respective forms, allowing me a quick a.s.sembly of the exemplary model of the mark two steam horse.

"To make it all simpler, let's call the bottom holes, cylinder holes, the middle hole in the upper chamber a steam intake, while the side holes in the upper chamber, exhaust holes."

If I were to call all of the openings in this engine just holes with added adjectives like upper, bottom, left and right, it would quickly get confusing, even if I were to point my fingers at them whenever I mentioned one of the holes. That's why, it was better to introduce some organisation even at the vocabulary level beforehand, to make all the explanations simpler.

"If we consider this engine to be in a natural position right now, with its cylinder plate pushed all the way to the left…"

Even though I said all the way, the plate was moved only to the point where still a small gap remained. Thinking about this, it would be wise to add some kind of blockade, that would prevent the piston plate to be pushed against the cylinder wall because, in that setting, the steam would have no way to enter the s.p.a.ce in between!

"... then the control mechanism in the upper chamber would lock away the left exhaust hole, allowing the steam intake to push the vapour through the left cylinder opening. At the same time, the right cylinder opening would connect to the right exhaust hole, allowing the remaining ga.s.ses to flow out."

Whenever I spoke about something happening, I moved my hands to place the right parts to their designed position, sometimes forced to add the thickness to the control piston as to indicate that its final version would be simply thicker.

No matter how advanced this exemplary project already was, it was nothing but a prototype aimed to calculate all the properties of the required parts as to the next piece that would be soon cast with our blast furnace could be put to use without the annoying process of prolonged testing and adjusting.

"While for now I need you, sir, to imagine it, as the piston rod will be pushed out of the engine, it will pull the control rod along, pulling those two control plates to their new positions. As the cylinder plate would be pushed to the right by the steam, the settings of the opened and closed holes would change, not letting the steam to enter through the right cylinder opening, with right exhaust hole closed by the control plate, and with all the remaining gases escaping from the cylinder s.p.a.ce through its left opening and the left exhaust hole."

The whole idea of the control chamber based on those two plates, mounted on a single rod, blocking one of the exhaust holes out of the system while stopping any fresh steam from escaping while the exhaust vapour would move out of the system. Yet contrary to how I automated the mechanism of opening and closing the valves in the atmospheric steam engine, this system was simply necessary because of two factors.

First, the alternation process between pushing and pulling the power rod connected to the main cylinder was simply too fast for any human to realistically be able to operate it… And what was even more important, the entire system would be enclosed, making it impossible to operate it by hand in the first place!

"I think I understand now… And since there is no need to constantly bring the water back and forth, you will cool the vapour somewhere else and let it drip back to the boiler tank, right?"

After my detailed explanation, anyone who learned about the principle of the steam engines should be able to understand the means at which they would operate but to come up with a new idea to improve outer parts of the system?

Times and times again, Governor was proving that his position wasn't inherited, but obtained through his own, vivid imagination and intelligence!

"Yeah. If I wanted to let the steam go to waste, the speed at which freshwater would have to be supplied would require at least a half of the power that this engine could produce."

As the show was done now, I picked all the parts and moved back to my tent while ordering some workers to bring me a bucket of formable clay. Now that the prototype was finished, I could work on the clay to create the final moulds that would be later used to cast the real thing!

Obviously, due to the fact that the engine consisted of both stationary and moving parts, it would still be made with two separate halves, firstly filled with the necessary parts and then bound together by a thin layer of liquid metal. With no melding tools, that was the only way in which I could make sure it would have any endurance, as any attempts of binding it together by the ropes or nails would simply end up with a vapour explosion!

"So, what are your plans for now? Like, I know you want to settle the carpentry plant to get some additional income that could cover at least a part of the costs for all your projects, but in terms of the next few days or weeks, what do you plan to do?"

To be honest, I was slowly getting used to this approach of the governor. Instead of letting the emotions sweep his mind and push him to the wonderlands of the future, he preferred to stay down to earth, slowly but steadily forcing me to adopt this approach of his to my own way of thinking.

"Since now I have the prototype to work on, I will focus on setting the production for those steam engines. With how boilers and heaters can be made by literally any craftsman around the country, rather than wasting my time and resources on doing so, I will just keep producing those base units. As soon as I will get a few of them ready, I will push some of my manpower and resources to improve the smelters and built said carpentry, but in the short term, those engines will be my priority."

While I still allowed myself to project my actions for the near future, I ended my response on a decisive note for the actions I would directly focus on right now.

With the prototype, after creating two or maybe three next models, I could perfect the sizes and dimensions for all the parts, and start crafting all the engines I would ever want!

"Okay then. What do you need from me right now then? More men? More materials?"

Sensing what was my greatest worry right now, Jan instantly changed the topic to the real problems, rather than wasting his and my time on praising the ingenuity of my inventions.

"I need everything. Every man you can spare, every penny that lies unused in your coffers, every brick, every nail, every chain… I don't think I need to go on with the list. But right now, I would be incredibly happy if you could send a messenger to my wife so that she could bring our own gold, men and beer. I want to let my workers celebrate all the successes we achieved already!"

Read novel online » Road To The Crown » 141 Prototype

27th April 1574

After all the commotion caused by the appearance of the Governor, before even the sun had the chance to peek at how this land looked now after my dedicated workers finished the blast furnace, Jan already boarded the same ship that carried him here and departed to the Sandomir, claiming that there was no point for him to stay here.

While I could understand his reasons, it still made me a bit sad seeing how he left so soon. Even if it would help just a bit, having him behind my back here could work wonders in terms of both the workers and the villagers' morale!

Speaking of the villagers, after they finished all the construction work for their own housing, I instantly put them to work, asking them to move all the ore from the foothold of the mine to the specially designated flat and empty s.p.a.ce below the blast furnace.

Even though I knew that in reality, this kind of smelting wasn't even close to what I should do given all the tools and knowledge that I had on hand, for now, just like I promised to the Governor, I wanted to focus on making the final model of the steam horse mark two!

Yet it wasn't as simple as I thought it would be. Even if ignoring the fact that two of the models that I thought to be perfect, ended up simply deforming because of how fast I took them out of the mould, unable to hold my excitement, even when the third one finally came out it still turned out to be unusable due to some small mistakes I made while forming the shape of the form for it.

That's why, despite the entire day pa.s.sing without me making any progress, I was sitting down in my tent, carefully moving small portions of the wet clay around the form in front of me, trying to make sure that every single part would end up perfect.

With no tools to create round shapes, I had to compromise and just go for the general curve, basing it on the round shape of the cylinder plates that came out in the right size during their second casting already.

Yet while thinking about all the resources that I seemingly wasted on the failed products, someone else might accusee me of wasting the resources that could be put to use elsewhere, but thanks to how the blast furnace worked, resmelting the failed metal products was as simple as just dropping them along with the ore and waiting for the furnace to do the rest of the work!

But after all the time I spent on remoulding the shape of the form and fixing all the problems that might arise, I finally left this clay structure on the side… and took the spare bucket with clay to make another one, as close to its brother as I could make it!

With how the round shape of the insides of both chambers required to be achieved, rather than just making a round ball and letting the molten iron cover it all before being allowed to cool down, I had to form both the inner and outer parts of the form, to let all the walls be as equal in thickness as possible!

Yet thanks to how used I was to this task after all the previous failures, finishing the other part of the form wasn't that hard and took me only two hours or so!

But after all of this hard work, I could finally pick one of the forms up and carry it to the blast furnace, before going all the way back and repeating the process with the other one. While I was capable of creating them in a fairly short amount of time, it still wasn't something that I was willing to just destroy by not acting carefully around it!

"Sir, did you finish the forms?"

With how I kind of overreacted when the last three attempts ended up failing, most of the workers already knew that I was working on something new. Considering the kind approach I took to all those working under me, while I knew it was against the social standard of the age, I didn't mind when even the simple workers started to address me more directly.

"Yeah, will the new batch of iron flow anytime soon?"

As the blast furnace burned through layers of fuel and ore stacked on top of each other, there were times when one had to wait up to even a fifteen minutes of the new batch of liquid metal to start flowing out. Even though this process wasn't super precise but more of a guessed timing, even if I were to be forced into standing here idle for an hour, I was set on watching my first ever pressure steam horse come into being!

"I guess, it's been ten minutes since the last flow, so in another five minutes next batch should come."

Even though my own projects took up quite a lot of iron, with how the pile of ore behind the furnace only continued to grow as more and more of its pieces were halted from the foothold of the mountain to the stockpiling area, I didn't need to worry about running out of iron for my projects for at least a few more days, despite how most of the pig iron that managed to flow out of the furnace so far, was already used in all sorts of other moulds!

After all, while my steam engine would allow me to push this place to a new level in terms of development, there was still a need to produce various parts from blades, through pipes all the way to simple tools.

"Sir, it started coming out!"

With a group of workers wearing thick gloves made out of several layers of cloth covered in the expensive animal skin, carefully moving the forms to the thick, leading pipe that spread the trickling, liquid metal evenly between all of the forms, I could see how at first only a few drops of iron fallen to the forms only to be replaced with a constant stream filing all the holes and the gaps.

Yet even when all the forms finally filled up, forcing the workers to pull on the chains, forcing the liquid metal to stay in a small bowl right in front of the furnace's mouth so that it wouldn't spill all around while they moved the pipe to the next row of forms, I still remained idle.

After all, I wasn't willing to repeat the same mistake I did with the previous two forms. Using the spare time I had on hand, I confirmed that all of the inner parts were already prepared for me to put them inside the very first steam engine.

"Sir, it should be done by now."

While the workers at the furnace only had about two days worth of experience in their job, with how constant their task was, most of them learned how to judge the results just by glancing over it.

"Great!"

Seeing that the iron was still flowing down the half-pipe to the forms near the last part of the rows with forms, I hurriedly smashed the clay brick with a nearby small hammer, cleaning the half of the steam engine from the rubble and dust with just a few swipes of my hand.

Disregarding my position as the n.o.ble, I carefully placed all the parts in their respective places, making sure that everything fitted its location perfectly, before grabbing a strange form that I prepared long ago.

With all the parts of the steam engine in place, I cleaned the other half from the dust as well and closed the entire thing with my hands alone. Only then did I add the next form that fits perfectly around the engine, covering all the length of the ugly scar that indicated that it still consisted of two separate parts.

Strapping it all together with a set of ropes, seeing how the flow of molten iron was slowly thinning, I even called some of the workers to help me out with my tasks, before ordering the operators of the pipe to raise it once again, and fill the last form of mine.

With no welding tools and no way to add a small layer of iron on top of the steam horse's casing edge, I had no other way than to apply a thick layer of iron all around the split where those two halves connected!

Following my order without even a second of hesitation, the workers raised the pipe, forcing the remaining iron to once again pile up in the small bowl, before lowering it above the single opening in my current form.

As the hot metal poured inside, no one was allowed to stay near this new invention of mine, due to the hazardous nature of the process. Only when the last drop of iron finally fell down to the form and managed to spill out, did the workers pulled on the chains once again, and locked them on a special hold.

After all, if they were to fill some of the forms only partially, the resulting product would very well be melted down, as I wouldn't accept any fragile tools on objects in my lands of industrialisation!

But rather than worrying over what the workers were supposed to do with the remaining metal, I waited for long enough to let the metal cool down and solidify, before smashing the form into pieces.

And with that, mark two steam horse was finally done!

Read novel online » Road To The Crown » 142 Finishing Touches