The successful and safe natural gas fire well salt cooking method is only the first step to improve well salt production.

Even if all the current fire wells in Gongjing Township are rectified and the additional output is increased, it will only be enough for the living expenses of 200,000 to 300,000 people.

Of course, there are still 200,000 to 300,000, which is equivalent to half of the population of Jianwei County. Originally, the output of salt wells in Jiangyang and Han'an counties was to supply what the entire county of Jianwei County needed, and half of the Ba County. (Shu County currently relies on the well salts in Qiong County and Guangdu, both near Chengdu, and does not eat Zigong well salt)

Now, salt, equivalent to 40% of the entire county's population, can be taken out, but the scale is not enough to support the trade in South China, so this bait is not attractive enough to the Southern Barbarians.

There are still many things to do in the future, such as first of all, we must find ways to let the people continue to dig deep into the well that they originally dared not dig further.

Secondly, we need to develop tools that can bore long rods. It is best to bore the bamboo joints directly in the thick bamboo. In this way, the expanded construction cost of fire wells will be lower in the future. For each less interface of the bamboo, a batch of pig skin gelatin and raw paint will be used less, which will be more reliable.

Finally, we continue to search for the self-flow well that has not been discovered yet.

It has been July, and it has been half a month since Li Suchu came to Jiangyang. There is only one last month left to Qiuhu to send troops.

Originally, Li Su should have set off to Zhuti to adapt to the climate in Yunnan in advance. In order to make the well salt work quickly, he had to compress the climate adaptation period for more than ten days to ensure that he had to arrive in Zhuti after half of July.

So, Li Su seized the time very quickly.

A few days ago, while waiting for the gas pipe test, he was not idle. He kept sending his staff to visit the fields, looking for local elders who were familiar with geography to inquire about the situation, and finding the nearby places with the hardest geology and the lowest terrain.

Because those who know a little about hydraulic physics know that the anti-concave hard strata are the easiest to form self-blasting wells. Since the word "self" in Zigong's place name is the self-flow, it is certain that this geographical feature will not be wrong.

With Li Su's efforts to search, there was indeed something to gain. Finally, some waste wells that failed to mine were found in the west of Gongjing Township, about ten miles away.

After collecting enough information, the household officials in Jiangyang County patiently explained to Li Su: "This place is the lowest basin around the surrounding area, with two mountains sandwiched between north and south. Therefore, according to old saying that as early as the period of the pseudo-thief Gongsun Shu, local wealthy families felt that brine was easily accumulated in the low-lying areas, so they wanted to dig a well here.

But after only a few dozen feet deep, I encountered a very hard slate and gave up. Later, some people tried it in the Ming and Zhang years, but they couldn't even penetrate it. No one would have to pay any more trouble in the future."

Li Su heard that it was an abandoned well that had not yet been released from water, so he was not afraid of using violent means. He did not dare to do anything randomly in Gongjing, mainly because the well had already released water and gas. If the black gunpowder burst and collapsed, the original good well would be destroyed, and it might lead to gas explosion. But since water has never been released from here, it is not a pity because the slate is too strong.

The black gunpowder formula that Li Su makes people tinker with can be slightly optimized every year. Last year, the monkey who only released the "White Rainbow Punching the Moon" in the Taimiao of Chang'an has now tried engineering blasting, but the power is a little less, and may not be as good as the black gunpowder blasting of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom in history.

Until the middle of the Qing Dynasty, the blasting of black gunpowder basically stayed at the level of "filling a coffin with a coffin filled with black gunpowder, and blocking it tightly around it to detonate it, so that the brick and stone walls of the big city must be blown up." And it must be ensured that it must be tightly sealed. If there is a slight leak in air and pressure relief, most of the blasting power will be leaked out by the tunnel, and the city walls will not be blown up at all.

It is simply incomparable to the rock formations that can be broken into several meters of rock in a few kilograms in later generations.

But Li Su had no other choice. If he was to build a water conservancy project, he could use Li Bing to build Dujiangyan, using fire to boil water and pour heat expansion and contraction to crack the rock. However, this is digging a well. There is insufficient oxygen in the underground well and setting fire cannot be burned. Only blasting drugs for redox are allowed.

Li Su asked the craftsman to use long iron chisels to chisel the slate as much as possible, and then fill it with medicine. He did not dare to chisel many scattered holes like modern blasting, because he knew that he did not have detonators and other efficient detonation techniques, so he could only directly point long leads, for fear that the structure would be complicated and the explosion would not be complete.

Because I didn't bring enough gunpowder to Jiangyang County, I waited for several days and got a large amount of supplies from the warehouse in Chengdu.

Moreover, considering that Zigong will have significant strategic development value in the future, the benefits will be huge after the salt output is high. In addition, important strategic confidentiality materials must be used. In order to strictly manage, Liu Bei sent his cousin and junior brother Liu Deran, who had been with him for several years, to let him supervise salt affairs.

There is no need to worry about technical matters, as long as you don’t deceive Liu Bei and leak secrets, and leak strategic material management information. This is also considered as Liu Bei’s long-term wealth for his uncle and his cousin’s family to repay his uncle’s kindness to go to Luoyang to find Lu Zhi to study.

Before the gunpowder was transported, Li Su sent someone to drill holes for four or five days, and dig out a huge crack about a meter deep from the slate at the bottom of the waste well, and then poured a rough black gunpowder of about a coffin into it. A hundred steps away from everyone, Li Su himself hid three or four hundred steps before he could make the fire burn.

After a few loud noises, the nearby ground trembled slightly, and the walls of the abandoned well collapsed and were completely shattered and buried.

However, since it was a waste well, it was just a violent cleanup. Li Su asked someone to dig out all the gravel and earthworks and transport it away. It took several days to hollow out all the collapsed ones and then chisel the part that was easy to dig at the bottom, which was at least several feet deeper than the original well.

As for the reinforcement of the well wall, let’s talk about it when the slate layer is completely solved and normal drilling is started.

The salt wells in Zigong are very deep. Wells more than 100 feet at the end of the Han Dynasty were very popular, which is only two or three hundred meters. The deepest ones can reach more than four hundred meters. They can reach eight hundred meters in the Tang and Song dynasties, and nearly kilometers in the Ming and Qing dynasties.

The deepest record is that it was during the Qianlong and Jiaqing period of the Qing Dynasty, and it was dug until the early years of Daoguang. It was dug for 90 years and a well was more than 1,100 meters deep, which was deeper than the second industrial revolution in the West after thirty years. It was when it first dug oil.

Until the end of World War I, the British opened the Malabo oil field in Venezuela and dug only 1,200 meters; in the 1930s, the Japanese only dug 1,500 meters in Daqing, so they failed to find 1,800 meters of oil.

The waste well, which is suspected to be a 100-meter-long meter here, has to be dug. Li Su cannot wait to see it appear. At most, he is to find a way to break through the thickest slate layer. The subsequent slow work will be handed over to the specific person in charge to take it slowly.

According to the craft speed of the late Han Dynasty, those within 200 meters can basically dig a depth of seven or eight meters to more than ten meters every month. The depth between two or four hundred meters will be reduced to four or five meters per month. When the 400 meters go up, it will only be one or two meters per month, and the difficulty will increase exponentially.

It can be said that hard work pays off. Li Su supervised Ziliujing for more than half a month. After blasting twice, he smashed and dug, and actually broke through the most difficult slate slab layer.

The craftsmen tasted the salty and bitter sandstone again. Although it was not wet, they felt that at least the direction was fine. In the end, they had to wait for the end of the Nanzheng to come back. If the situation was good enough, it would be more than twenty feet deeper than now.

...

No decisive results have been achieved at the Ziliu Well, but Li Su has not been in vain for the past ten days, because during the subsequent mass production and running-in process, the Gongjing also created some useful things that can facilitate the expansion of production and reduce costs.

It turned out that Li Su made a "human-powered foot-stepping boring machine" with a long and straight enough hydraulic forging iron rod, and combined with the pedal mechanism driven by the tooth chain.

This thing is not technically high, and it is easier than sewing machines at least for an era. During the Renaissance, the Milanese people in Italy could use it, and they could use it when making weapons and armor. After all, it was just a rotating shaft and a knife head.

If the tool head is fixed and does not rotate, it is the lathe. If the tool head rotates with the shaft, it is the boring machine. If the workpiece does not rotate, it is the boring machine.

The Renaissance pedal lathes can only car wood, which is similar to the simple machines of car beads in later generations. It is definitely not possible to process metals. In this era, there was no operation to add coolant to the tool, and it is easy to rub hard things and burn red and collapse the knife.

But Li Su didn't need them to process metal. He just wanted to "bore the bamboo joints without cutting off the bamboo joints". Therefore, this kind of broken machine with wooden sticks on the bike is just enough. The bamboo joints are thin and not very hard. The steel knife is easy to break when it rotates.

After the machine appeared, the craftsmen tried it. Although they had broken several bamboo poles at the beginning and several sets of rotary knives were also broken. But then they thought of a way to fill the bamboo tube with some water, slant down slightly, and lower the other end of the bamboo joint so that the blade would get water when it turned over, and lubricate and cool. Sure enough, the bamboo joint was bored.

In this way, Li Su can use a whole bamboo as a gas pipe, and the number of interfaces is greatly reduced. Originally, it is several feet to connect and now it is several feet or even dozens of feet to connect and so on.

Of course, there are also disadvantages of water-cooled boring, which is that the knife is prone to rust and wear, but these are all small problems. Li Su later asked people to use phytic acid oil as sharpening oil to cool it, but they can only add a little bit. After all, phytic acid oil is expensive, and you can always find the best way to run in slowly.

In this way, after Li Su "reduces costs and increases efficiency" solved the scale problem of salt boiling in Gongjing, he also tinkered with the original lathe "can drive wood and bamboo". Although he could not see any significant value for the time being, it was still better than nothing.

On July 15th, Li Su, who could no longer delay the salt service, hurriedly said goodbye to Chen Shi, and then took his personal soldiers and pulled dozens of ships of salt and salt to Zhuti County to adapt to the climate and prepare for the southern expedition.

Li Su never jokes about his health, saying that he wants to adapt to the climate in Nanzhong a month in advance to alleviate the local environment and to alleviate the local environment, so that he must ensure it in full time. Moreover, after arriving in Zhuti, Li Su had to relax and rest for a while to adapt, and could not work as soon as it landed.

Considering that the increase in Zigong well salt production was slower than he expected, Li Su felt that he had to slapped his face and pretended to be fat. He had only achieved three points, but he had to brag to tens of them, so that he could cause the greatest temptation to the salt-deficient Southern Barbarians.

"Or pretend to promote in advance that Zigong has fired a self-blasting well with anger. You can use no one to use the brine, and the brine will be automatically sprayed out. It also brings its own fire and salt to boil, which is inexhaustible..."
Chapter completed!