I am not an ant thief in the Three Kingdoms

Chapter 382, Glass Factory
The new glass manufacturing factory was selected by Xu Wei to be located in a saline-alkali wasteland near the sea in Zhangwu County, Bohai County.After all, after the glass factory is established, there will be a lot of pollutants, and it will also affect the output of the surrounding farmland. The impact on production in the saline-alkali land is slightly less, and glass is fragile. Compared with road transportation, sea transportation is safer.

After choosing the factory site, Zhang Baiqi found some masons and spent 10 days building a giant factory building with brick and wood structure!About the size of a basketball court.

Finally, it is the internal setting of the factory building. The people who build sintering furnaces, smelting furnaces, annealing furnaces, and large-scale cadres have a lot of experience in building blast furnaces, and there is not much difference between firing glass and blast furnaces in steel factories. Even technically speaking, steel blast furnaces The technology is higher. After all, the melting temperature of glass is less than [-] degrees, but steel needs to be more than [-] degrees. The blast furnace for making glass does not even need refractory bricks.

The construction of the factory building is not so fast, but the experiment of making glass in advance can start very quickly. First build a small blast furnace, dry boiler, and start making glass after finding raw materials.

The manufacture of glass is not very difficult. First pour quartz sand to melt it. Of course, if there is no such thing, it is the same to use sand from the seaside. It is also very convenient to make the glass factory by the seaside to a certain extent to obtain raw materials.

Of course, compared with sand, quartz sand is a better raw material for glass. After the raw material is available, limestone is poured in to help melt it, and plant ash is used to clarify the glass, and soon a dark green glass liquid will appear.

These melted glass liquids are poured into special square basins. When the glass cools down, a square glass will appear. Besides this, Xu Wei also pulls out a glass rod. After the glass rod cools down, use it again. The grinder grinds them into the shape of glass balls. These glass beads are basically a circle larger than the marbles Xu Ruoyun played when he was a child, and about the size of pigeon eggs.

These two glass shapes are the products that the glass factory will manufacture in the future.

In this era, there is no even window paper. Rich people use spun gauze, while those who have no money only have wood panels. The light can only be seen from the skylight on the roof. There are basically no windows made of glass, but in Xu Wei’s world, glass windows It is the main purpose of glass, and this is also the main purpose of glass factories. 2000 million units use glass windows. This is a market worth tens of billions!
But glass balls can be regarded as a fast-selling product, and glass balls can also be regarded as a kind of gem in this era. As long as the news is kept secret, these glass balls will be listed in several states in Dahan at the same time.It should be possible to make a small profit, probably with a few small goals!
Although this is nothing to Daqian, Xu Wei thinks it's good to be able to deceive the nobles of the big man.

And Zhang Baiqi, who followed Xu Weilai, looked at all this dumbfounded. In this era, glass is also a kind of gemstone, and the price is extremely high, several times higher than the weight of gold.

He couldn't even imagine that gemstones were mass-produced from a blast furnace like this.Where is this glass factory? It is simply a factory that can produce gold.

After reacting, he smiled pleasantly and said: "We have made a fortune in power. If we sell these glasses to the wealthy and powerful families of the big men, we can earn billions of dollars as long as there are tens of thousands of them. We have the technology to make gems. This Not to mention 30 billion a year in the glass factory, even 300 billion is probably not a problem!

But Xu Wei broke Zhang Baiqi's fantasy and said: "Things are rare and expensive. If you get dozens or hundreds of glass balls, you may sell them for hundreds of thousands of dollars each. If there are millions of them, the glass ball will immediately become the same as the stone on the side of the road, no one will look at it, and it will never become a kind of gemstone.”

"So you can only make some quick money with such an idea. The powerful and nobles are not stupid. They only need to sell a few thousand pieces and they will realize the problem and know that the glass is actually worthless!"

Such things often happen in modern times. Aluminum was originally more expensive than gold, but as soon as electrolytic aluminum appeared, the price of aluminum plummeted, and it became a common building material. The same is true for diamonds. After the development of technology, a large number of diamonds With the emergence of mines, it stands to reason that this thing should also return to its original value.

But in order to swindle money, gem merchants actually come up with some diamonds, one item with two names, and the price is even more different, but it is such a scam, and many people are still fooled every year.

Xu Wei continued: "If you really want to make money in the glass industry, you still have to find a way to sell it at a low price so that tens of millions of people can afford glass. This is the real road to wealth. Just imagine, if The windows of the common people all over the world use glass. What a huge market this is. You can also use glass to make houses, drinking cups, various decorations, and small toys. It can be said that as long as you want as many industries as you want, the glass market will be huge. How big!"

After Zhang Baiqi heard it, he also began to think about where the glass can be used. Since the ruling party said that the market for glass is tens of billions, it must be wrong!
Xu Wei continued: "This small laboratory will continue to produce glass balls during this period. You arrange more than a dozen caravans and let them take these glass balls to the main cities of Dahan. They will start selling them in December. Presumably, these glass beads can earn back the money of the glass factory!"

Zhang Baiqi said with a smile: "Using the big man's money to help us build a glass factory, just think about it and be happy!"

Then Zhang Baiqi went to prepare to do this.

One month later!
After the glass factory was completed, the first batch of 200 apprentices also underwent simple training, and the technicians of the glass factory were just a few people who followed Xu Wei to do experiments. Their experience is even richer than Xu Wei.Under Xu Wei's command, they have been able to skillfully blow out various animal figures.But Xu Wei couldn't do this.

In this way, the construction of an earthen workshop-style glass factory was completed.The glass factory also started firing glass for the first time!
The huge sintering furnace was emitting a fainting heat, and the raw materials were continuously poured into the blast furnace by apprentices.

The scorching temperature makes the apprentices in the workshop sweaty.Many people's faces were exposed to such a high temperature environment for a long time and there was no protection, a layer of dead skin exploded, and the eyes of each one were burnt red from the fire.

Immediately after feeding the materials, apprentices pulled the bellows to melt the raw materials, and continued to pour limestone combustion accelerant, and the red glass solution appeared quickly.

But if you want to make glass that is not green, you need to add some strong oxidants to change the valence state of the ferrous iron. This requires the use of potassium nitrate made from plant ash, so that the color of the glass produced will be transparent.

To get a glass without bubbles, you need to add some salt, and you need to use a porcelain rod to stir the glass liquid so that there will be no bubbles.

After all this is done, take out the crucible in the furnace, and then go to a square porcelain basin, let the glass solution spread over the porcelain basin like a pancake, take out the glass and it becomes a square glass plate.Then enter the annealing furnace to reduce the stress of the glass, so that a qualified glass is produced.

After the first piece of glass appeared, assembly line work started later, and when this group of workers became more experienced, various glass products would appear in the big market.

(End of this chapter)