After extremely sharp, hard, and wear-resistant chromium steel tools began to appear, namely the first axes, Kawei began to smelt deeply, and now he is finally no longer fighting alone. In Rurik's plan, the entire Iron Squirrel tribe should become professional blacksmiths. He ordered Kawei to teach these people the skills. Kawei supported this, and Mechasta and his tribe even more It's full cooperation.
In an instant, Kawei became a technical consultant, and Rurik's knowledge of smelting made him useful as a consultant.
Suddenly, a number of small clay stoves sprung up like mushrooms after a rain. They built on a river beach with easy access to water. In order to avoid being exposed to rain, all the stoves were hurriedly built with shelters to protect them from the wind and rain.
At the beginning, the craftsmanship of those Corvin men was very crude and clumsy, but they knew that as long as they mastered advanced tools, their tribe might be as powerful as the Rus. They even have a "convert fanaticism" mentality, so-called showing their fighting spirit in order to gain Rurik's respect.
After all, Rurik provided them with a large amount of high-quality food indiscriminately. Rurik's behavior of paying for it out of his own pocket was naturally interpreted by them as positive feedback. In an instant, Kawei had no less than thirty adult students, and they at least created a few useful tools, such as very important shovels, chisels, drafts, axes, scrapers, meat cleavers, and a very small number of spearheads.
During production and processing, people have noticed that all chromium steel products have excellent hardness and rigidity, but almost no elasticity.
Rurik knew that the elasticity of chromium steel was very poor, so he gave up the idea of using it to make a steel-arm crossbow, but came up with the idea of making another chromium steel dagger. Rurik did not expect chromium steel to make a longer sword, or a weapon exclusive to Teutonic men like the "Doppler Sword". The reason was that chromium steel lacked toughness. Even after annealing, this terrible Resilience can’t save it either.
As metal tools and cold weapons, hardness is basically the most important thing. The steel-arm crossbow can be said to be an effective and effective weapon in the war created by imagination here.
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For the Kewen people, of course they hope to have a sword to show their excellence to the villagers.
But that was too unrealistic. They settled for the next best thing and yearned for an excellent short spear of their own.
After all, they are Covins, and this claim comes from the special short spear with a hook they like to equip. Nowadays, obsidian and iron ore spearheads are no longer used, and they have begun to forge chromium steel spearheads on Rurik's orders.
Rurik knows that in terms of weapons, nothing is more cost-effective than a short spear. I am afraid that the short spear is also the most critical weapon for the human species to rise from obscurity to domination of the Blue Star.
Considering his huge consumption of supplies during this period, Rurik began to consider making weapons and selling them.
Legally, all the surviving Iron Squirrel tribesmen are his slaves, and Rurik has the right to ask for whatever he wants from them.
Rurik did not take things to such extremes. He first ensured the safety of these people's residence and food supply. As for their other labor values, of course, he had to take away all the value of their labor. How to measure their labor value surplus? That’s what chrome steel tools produce!
He decided to sell these tools in exchange for the fruits of others' labor to supplement his own consumption, thereby achieving a stable positive cycle.
So, who are the buyers? !
There is a saying that wealth should not flow to outsiders. Of course Rurik knew that iron tools were a huge profit, and he also understood that forging iron requires one's own strength.
We must first meet the needs of our own tribe members for tools and weapons, and then wait until the limited domestic demand market is saturated before selling them externally.
What's the biggest problem right now?
Rurik saw that even if he controlled a super mine, due to his current limited technology and stretched labor force, it would be difficult to quickly explore its wealth value.
Currently, the most consumed material in settlements is food.
Rurik was a little lucky, because the residents of the settlement and even the population of a huge area only ranged from 10,000 to 20,000 people, so the pure natural products in the area could basically feed everyone.
The premise, of course, is that the fishermen work hard! In order to get more fish to satisfy his hunger under limited production capacity, Rurik has been rapidly depleting his silver coin inventory. During this period, the daily consumption of fresh fish in the settlement exceeded one thousand pounds. Adding in other losses, Rurik calculated by himself that the daily financial expenses would be close to two hundred silver coins.
Of course Rurik can spend a long time with high consumption, but he does not fully expect Gould, a super dealer, to use his past goods to make huge wealth for himself in the south, thus making up for the losses in the north. .
This expectation is obviously a pursuit of the past.
All the symptoms point to a very clear and extremely bad problem - my labor force is insufficient. Even if I beat them with a whip, they are not work monsters with three heads and six arms.
what to do? !
mechanical!
After two weeks of construction, a miniature city made almost entirely of wood rose from the ground through the extensive use of wood. In fact, it only completed the construction of a single-layer wooden fence. If you look closely, you will see that the fence is still full of holes and needs more wooden strips to reinforce it.
The wooden city on the riverside has a large number of Novgorod-style wood carvings, but there are also some semi-buried wooden sheds that were quickly excavated and built by the Kovin people.
Eight warning watchtowers have also been built. Although these wooden towers make Rurik feel shaky, their appearance does allow sentries with good eyesight to see far away places from the watchtowers, such as the North Winding Road. The winding river channel, and even some white and squirming two points that suddenly appeared in the distance were undoubtedly polar bears.
Every day, loggers return with their prey, and it has even become an industry.
The emergence of the crossbow has given children terrifying hunting abilities!
However, a small Corvin hunter like Terravis was very good at using wooden bows. He proudly used a large number of iron cluster arrows, and his hunting efficiency was greatly improved. In comparison, his fellow Russians of the same age, such as Fisk, Kanuf and other children who were dragged to the north by Rurik to see the world, found that their hands were so clumsy and they admired Tyravis's superb skills. While practicing archery, the love of brotherhood also deepens.
Even children, they worship anyone of the same camp who has fighting ability, even if it is a Corvin person.
Rurik did not want to interfere with the hunting behavior of his men for the time being. They were a group of eaglets scattered out. It would be best if they could practice their martial arts through their own hunting. If there are casualties, then you can only ask for luck. Because this is the true Nordic survival law. In the boreal forest, either the hunter wins or the prey wins.
The results of it? Rurik soon learned of these things.
Tyravis and his Ross friends used two crossbows in the forest to kill three brown bears and one white bear in just one day. The other two were killed by the sharp-eyed Tyravis. Twenty alert snowshoe hares changing their summer coat.
Their growth was gratifying, but Rurik was distressed by the slow growth in chromium steel tool production capacity.
Finally, he decided to make some changes.
A warm night, a bright campfire.
After finishing the day's blacksmithing, Kawei and the strong mercenaries gathered together to talk and laugh. Now Rurik is willing to pay more for the mercenaries who forge the iron. They have chromium steel axes and have become more and more cooperative in the past few days.
Now, they had just eaten a dinner that was almost full of various barbecued meats, and were waiting for Rurik's new decision.
In front of the moving flames, Rurik sat cross-legged on a soft bearskin. Fire danced in his eyes as everyone looked forward to his new ideas.
"Maybe... I am a little eager for quick success. Now we are facing a big dilemma. Our chromium steel production is too low."
Kawei muttered in a low voice: "So what? We still lack blacksmiths. I also have a dilemma. Those people carry ore every day. Now the ore has piled up into a hill, but my furnace cannot complete the processing well."
"This is the problem, so we must take countermeasures." Rurik straightened his back and emphasized.
"Countermeasures? What are your countermeasures? In my opinion, the strength of brothers is like this, and you can't force it on everyone."
Rurik felt that Kawei was thinking linearly, which was not surprising.
He didn't want to make any more twisty things, and pointed his little hand directly at the river churning under the night sky not far away: "Just use the power of water! Kawei, your dilemma is actually the lack of masters in blacksmithing! Then, I will let the river do it. As a new blacksmith!”
"What? Dahe is a blacksmith?!" Kawei was stunned for a moment, then laughed.
This unbridled laughter is not only Kawei's distrust of absurd things, but also a way to vent his fatigue during this period of time with laughter.
The ridiculous laughter soon caused all the mercenaries to laugh loudly and weirdly.
Infected by this laughter, Rurik's tight little mouth also smiled.
Rurik didn't feel ridiculed at all. Indeed, even if it was a relatively simple hydraulic machine, this group of people who had almost no concept of machinery found it ridiculous simply because they had never seen it before.
The smile was also a smile. When the happy atmosphere settled down, Kawei asked earnestly: "Rurik, are you really serious?"
"Why did I lie to you?! I want you to do it for me tomorrow, and you guys too!"
After saying that, Rurik stood up, gesticulating with his hands and talking nonstop.
"I want you to dig a small waterway by the river, and I want to build a house beside the waterway. I want you to cut down a straight tree and let it stand in the middle of the house on the riverside, and it will be washed by the water and keep rotating. I want you to You make some fixed hammers, so that the rotating wooden rod will drive the hammer to forge..."
It was difficult to explain it to them with words alone. Rurik saw that he had exhausted all his efforts to explain it, but Kawei still looked half-understood, so he was too lazy to waste any more words.
The reality is so real. Even for the experienced Kawei, his initial concept of machinery was limited to the "lever-type manual glass die-casting machine" in the Clavarson Blacksmith Shop.
Presumably for others, Kawei might be the first to explain it clearly.
This night, Rurik arranged the tasks of the mercenaries, and then got together with Kawei to draw simple pictures on the enemies with a small wooden stick. Rurik hoped that in this way, he could kill the enemy. Kawei has an abstract understanding of "waterwheel forging".
After Rurik's unremitting efforts, Kawei finally got the idea!
"Ah! It's really yours!" Kawei, who finally understood a little bit about it, excitedly patted Rurik on the shoulder.
"Do you understand everything?!"
"I understand. It's like the wheels of my handcart! Oh, you should have talked about the wheels earlier. Let the water flow push the wheels to rotate. The shaft inside has a fixed raised plectrum. This projection rotates to the long handle of the hammer. Press the hammer up, and when it leaves the correct position, the hammer will fall down. Is this the truth?!"
Hearing this, Rurik was so moved that he almost cried. His little face was already hot from the campfire, but because he finally asked his dear blacksmith to figure out the situation after a lot of talking, his face became even hotter because he was happy.
The next day, a new construction operation quietly began on the riverside.
There are no buyers now anyway, so the newly-made tools must first meet the labor needs of the builders. Those heavy chromium iron shovels and chromium iron drafts that were not carburized but only quenched and heat treated began to be put into excavation of the river.
Some Covin people cast curious glances. They really didn't understand what Lord Rurik wanted to do to the river. It seems that this strange action makes no sense. Some women speculated that perhaps Mr. Rurik wanted to make a trap to make reasonable fish spontaneously swim to the preset water hole. When the water inlet was quickly blocked, everyone desperately scooped out water, and all the fish in the pond were caught in one catch.
In the Oulu River Basin, the hometown of the Kovin people, various tribes know how to fish and cast nets to catch fish. They are also good at scooping water from cofferdams to catch fish.
What happened next was truly unexpected.
A new straight river appeared, which was dug for the mercenaries. It exceeds the depth of one stika. Due to the modification of the inherent river channel upstream, the water flow in the small river channel is more rapid.
In the next three days, a unique wooden carving house was built beside the river, but this was by no means the most curious thing.
A straight but not very thick piece of pine wood is cut down. It is a carefully selected wood and is a good material for making a wooden shaft because it is almost a cylinder with a very small tolerance.
Rurik actually found it difficult to accept a bearing that was not a pure cylinder. Due to this era, he could only tolerate this imperfection.
However, once the Ross tribe's first practical waterwheel mechanism, which he participated in the design and supervision of the construction, is put into production, it will not only complete a technical gap for the tribe, but will also bring about a revolution! Because of how this wooden shaft rotates, it is a little crooked and has another center of rotation, which is enough.
