Rurik intended to create an important facility for the Russians in this far north that they had never seen before, let alone imagined.
No one has any idea of what the word Kolanie(e) actually means and what kind of positive changes it can bring. Everyone only knows that the equipment Rurik wants to make has the ability to transport heavy wood onto a cargo sled. Rurik even boasted that once the construction of this thing is completed, only two to four people will be needed to complete the task that previously required twenty people.
If anyone else said this, it would definitely be nonsense.
The words came out of Rurik's mouth, and everyone believed them to be true. Now, a group of strong Russian hunters suddenly turned into lumberjacks and carpenters.
Still want winter hunting? Maybe it’s no longer possible.
More than a hundred Rus hunters who were good at logging and wood processing were retained by Rurik with very real rewards.
The so-called traveling north to catch ferrets is to seek money, but rare ferrets are not often found, and hunting in extremely cold conditions is also very risky. Since they are all seeking wealth, Lord Rurik is willing to give food and silver coins to all those who work for him in order to complete his great plan. Why not do this business of selling labor force?
Otto felt that his son's decision was a bit ridiculous. The strongest hunters stayed behind, making this year's hunting situation complicated.
"You just stay here and don't go there. I'll take the tribe to catch the bears." Without further words, Otto led his "mighty" hunting team and rushed east along the coastline. As for when he will come back, it will be a month later at least.
The main members of the hunting team are all there, and they intend to rush to the Oulu River Basin to compete with the local Kovin tribe for leather resources in the forest. By the way, they are also exploring and looking for new opportunities.
For example, the news about the Tavastians from the mouths of the Kovin people. If it is really discovered that these tribes have not surrendered to the Rus, Otto is not like Rurik who needs to think about it. He will not tell them. Attack directly with reason. Failure to surrender is a potential enemy, and hunting enemies is a highly profitable hunt.
Ironburg has been crowded for only four days, and both the permanent and temporary population of the settlement have dropped significantly.
But the settlement was still bustling with activity. Rurik forcefully mobilized 300 men and women from his ministry, a total of nearly 500 people. Under his personal control, he created a wonder - a large wooden rat cage. crane.
In terms of principle alone, the squirrel cage crane is not a complex machine. For Rurik, who had received education in mechanical manufacturing and had made considerable achievements in this field, he naturally thought it was simple.
In fact, it is clearly a Roman relic and was created by classical mechanical knowledge inherited from ancient Greece.
The Western Empire fell, and the inheritance of knowledge from the old era was also interrupted. Although the Frankish Carolingian Renaissance rescued some Western Roman heritage. For example, knowledge about construction technology, painting, and engineering machinery, without the influx of knowledge from Eastern Rome and the Great Eclipse, the Franks, from nobles to farmers, did not know what a squirrel cage crane was.
Fortunately, they at least know very basic knowledge such as the principle of leverage, so that they can build stone castles.
In the current era, only those lords in the northern Franks, because they were on the front line of expansion and resistance to foreign counterattacks, had the motivation to spend huge sums of money to build stone castles. As for ordinary lords, they would sharpen wooden stakes and place them on the ground to build so-called castles out of pure wood.
Even the Franks didn't understand things, and the Viking tribes around the Baltic Sea had no way of knowing.
Today, Rurik is going to build and put the squirrel cage crane into use at the settlement of Ironburg on the banks of the Kemi River, at the end of the Gulf of Bothnia.
Because this is a great piece of equipment that must be built, and it is currently designed to serve the winter supply shipment. Those reindeer sleighs are equivalent to the "load trucks" of this era. Although it is very dependent on the fact that the earth and oceans are frozen, in warm periods, it can naturally be used as an ore loader for reindeer cars (with a very limited load capacity).
Once it was successful, similar designs were used to build port machinery for the terminals at Roseburg and Ellenborough.
Rurik had to take precautions and consider that in the new era, when more and more ships imitate Caravel-type ships, the loading and unloading of port materials can no longer rely solely on porters. What's more, the Ross tribe's population is really limited, and its human resources are relatively scattered, but it is highly dependent on ocean transportation of materials.
It is necessary to build long-arm port machinery cranes in ports, and even wooden gantry cranes are needed in the future.
After the plan was finalized, he even boasted about it to his father. If he neglected this matter, his reputation would be damaged.
Rurik called his workers into action.
It is too far-fetched to expect illiterate people to do complex work. The quality of the population under Ross's control is like this. Rurik has no expectations for their craftsmanship, only hoping that the "carpenters" among them are as good at processing as they claim to be. wood.
After all, Rurik is a person who understands the management principles of "sweatshop" in the 21st century.
It is completely unrealistic to expect the tribesmen to really work hard for eighteen hours a day, like those English workers in the first industrial revolution. Because those bankrupt farmers did not have the right to beg, let alone the right to enter the mountains and forests to become hunters. Apart from working for early factory owners, the only other way was to immigrate to the other side of the world to pioneer the wild west of the new world.
The Russian people are still primitive as a whole, and Rurik cannot force them too much, even if his status is extremely noble.
Another factor limiting the number of hours they can work is the absolute lack of nighttime lighting.
The working hours for building cranes are mainly during the limited daytime. When night falls, it becomes unrealistic to continue working.
In this way, Rurik divided his people into groups in order to maximize the efficiency that could be implemented within the limited day time.
People took action, some were responsible for sawing huge fir trees, some were responsible for cutting pine boards, and some were twisting hemp rope.
The most critical part of the squirrel cage crane is a batch of bearings made of metal. Only to manufacture these, Rurik decided to personally supervise the work of Coven's blacksmith.
As for the women, their biggest job is to be responsible for logistics. They have to take charge of cooking and laundry, and when they really have some free time, they have to help with the important work of twisting hemp rope.
More than 300 strong men turned Ironburg into a huge wood processing factory.
Especially for the six huge fir trees, Rurik never imagined that they would become the first wood to be processed for the smooth construction and use of the crane.
Why? Simply because the wood quality of spruce is better than that of red pine, and it can withstand greater pulling force. Besides, they have been drying outdoors in the cold and dry for more than a month, and they have become more considerate.
Without oak, Rurik had to use spruce to make all the weighing parts of the equipment.
In this way, the ten pieces of wood in the middle part of the spruce trunk were slowly cut off by the two-man saw. Does a small boat like the Caravel with a displacement of fifty tons need a mast that is thirty meters long? Just ten meters is enough! This is what Rurik thought, but with ten stikas and a nine-meter-eight-meter-long tree trunk placed in the snow, it is still very long.
In order to ensure the stability and anti-settlement of the equipment, two cranes were built at a distance of about ten meters to lay the foundation outside the west gate of Ellenburg.
The strong man dug into the frozen soil and used manpower and reindeer strength to dig down two thick fir wood piles. A fir tree was quickly erected on the wooden pile at an angle. One end could be said to be looking up at the sky, while the other end was buried in the soil. This very thick wooden pole was the permanent fixed boom of the crane.
At its rear end, two "squirrel cages" with a diameter of four stikas are installed. The operator will walk in the cage and drive the bearing rotation to continuously tighten the hemp rope to achieve the lifting of the crane. In order to prevent the operator from expending too much physical strength, of course a pulley block must be used at the boom.
This is a device with an uncomplicated structure. Rurik initially thought of making a ratchet system. He especially thought of the "two-way ratchet wrench" of later generations. He could use this type of design to give "rats" "Cage" makes a ratchet retracting and releasing system, but it is still too complicated to think about.
Ratchet facilities are still needed, even if Rurik feels that the friction of the large amount of hemp rope wrapped around the bearing and the weight of the squirrel cage can withstand the pull of the transported object, which can ensure that the operator can pass the walking direction. , easily complete the work of reeling in the line and releasing the Range Rover.
Just in case, in order to prevent the heavy object from accidentally falling, a ratchet is still required, but this ratchet is special.
Rurik decided that the huge rat cage itself would be made into wooden gears. The ratchet latches in the direction of rotation of the unoccupied squirrel cage are designed on both sides of the squirrel cage. In this way, only the correct latches are needed to take up and unwind the wire, instantly and completely eliminating the accidental fall of goods.
Looking at the rat cages, Rurik used as many as fifty carpenters to make four rat cages.
The squirrel cage is not round, but has sixteen sets of pine spokes pieced together to form a hexagonal shape. The so-called spokes are thicker pine wood, so when the squirrel cage with a diameter of nearly four meters is completed, it appears to be crude as a whole.
It could be built more elaborately, but Rurik didn't want to waste so much time.
Making a squirrel cage is a big project, and making bearings made of chromium iron is even more complicated.
Ironburg's largest furnace became the key to making bearings.
Making ball bearings? The Russians do not have such high-tech capabilities, and even roller bearings cannot be made right now.
The largest stove burned some iron pillars. After they were fished out, they were immediately hammered by workers. According to Rurik's requirements, they were hammered into cylinders as much as possible, but only the two ends were required to be flattened (in order to embed the wood). ), and the overall shape is still guaranteed to be cylindrical.
Without ball bearings, Rurik thought of metal hard-contact bearings. This technology was completely familiar to the residents of Ironburg. The bearings of those riverside waterwheels have hard contact. As long as they are diligently filled with grease, judging from the stable operation experience of waterwheels, this kind of metal hard contact is acceptable.
The men worked hard, and their reward was a hard quota of two pounds of oats each, plus fish and salt.
Each of them will also receive a "salary" of five silver coins, among which workers engaged in squirrel cage manufacturing and iron smelting have a "salary" of ten silver coins. This "salary" is fair, and it will not be less than that of Russians just because they are from Covin. Including food supply, everyone is equally fair.
Rurik has ready-made silver coins on hand. If they are really not enough, he can directly exchange them for ready-made oats. Seventy thousand pounds of oats is no joke.
As a result, they mainly worked hard during the short daytime, and had to work for a while after nightfall. Ellenburg's daily oat consumption gradually approached the terrifying figure of one thousand pounds a day.
The high-intensity construction work lasted for twenty days before the two squirrel cage cranes built on hard soil were finally unveiled.
On the twenty-fifth day, the metal bearings between the two cages were connected. To erect the squirrel cage smoothly, Rurik simply used the wooden wall of Ironburg. The cable used the wooden wall as a stress point, and inside the wooden wall, the combined force of human and animal forces pulled the squirrel cage lying down. up and finally hung on its rightful stand.
February 1st of the Julian calendar is also the coldest period in Ironburg. Corresponding to the cold is the enthusiasm of the residents of Ironburg.
Just yesterday, Rurik issued a big order: "We have been fighting for a whole month and have consumed 30,000 pounds of grain. All our efforts are for these two cranes. Now is the most critical moment. , let’s finish installing the pulley block and cable section!”
More than a hundred people completed the installation of the final parts at night, under the illumination of numerous bonfires.
When the sunshine of a new day shines on the earth, just beside the west gate of Fort Ellen, two huge equipments with a strong punk texture stand in the world of ice and snow, as if they come from another era.
The squirrel cage crane appeared to be a success, requiring only one successful loading and unloading and proving itself reliable.
On this day, all the men, women, and children who lived in Ironburg came out in full force. There were also a group of people standing on the wooden walls and towers, hoping to get a good viewing spot to see this wonder.
They clearly built it with their own hands and witnessed it transform from wood to a standing "monster".
Mechasta was very emotional. He knew that the Iron Squirrel Tribe had really benefited from Rurik. For example, almost all Kewen men's chests with clear ribs have become rounded due to their crazy eating of wheat, and some of them actually have belly fat. Even the women of the tribe got at least one pound of wheat every day because of the logistical problems. The mother naturally gave the grain to her children, and the children of the tribe also became fat. The above are all things that the tribal people never dared to think about.
All efforts were made for the equipment in front of him. Mechasta shouted excitedly, and his tribesmen also talked and laughed with smiles on their faces.
Rurik did not dare to relax at all. He ignored the laughter of the onlookers with a solemn face.
"Jevlo!"
"exist!"
"Start your performance according to our plan!"
"Follow your orders!" The excited Jevro, with his three mercenary brothers, totaling four people, really crawled into the cage through the gaps in the spokes like mice.
Some other mercenaries used the hooks of the pulleys to hang the ropes tied to the pine tree trunks used for the test.
Seeing Rurik preparing to take action, the whispers were silent. Even Mechasta, who wanted to talk to Rurik, shut up this time.
Everyone held their breath, and upon hearing Rurik's order, hundreds of pairs of eyes focused on the rat cage that began to rotate slowly.
Instantly, a squeaking sound came, and the uncoordinated sound came from the hard contact bearing. Not only is it a direct metal-to-hard contact, the bearing is not a true cylinder. It is a makeshift lifting equipment, but its effectiveness cannot be denied.
There are mercenaries who are always responsible for controlling the ratchet latches on the outside of the squirrel cage to ensure that heavy objects will not fall when they are pulled up.
The wheels of the pulley are made of fir, with metal bearings embedded in the middle. The pulley block is slowly rising carrying the wood. It has been being lifted, and finally it was lifted to the lifting limit of the crane, which is three stikas, about three meters.
Although this pine tree is not as extreme as the huge fir tree, anyone with a discerning eye knows that this thing cannot be carried by three or four strong men. As a result, the two people in the mouse cage were obviously walking around casually. They had indeed been walking for a while. Not only was the extremely heavy pine wood being lifted, everyone had to raise their heads and squint their eyes to look at the high wood. Many people subconsciously think that if they stand at the bottom and get hit by it, their brains will be damaged.
"Master, haha! Looks like we have a great success!" Yevluo in the mouse cage shouted excitedly.
Rurik was also very happy. He also squinted his eyes, especially looking at the pulley block at the top of the boom and the condition of the anti-wear iron sheet wrapped around the wood.
"Yevluo! Now there is one last test. Listen to my order and prepare to change the tenon! Yevluo, turn around and prepare to move in the opposite direction!"
The latch system operates in reverse. The squirrel cage and the latch work together to form an actual large ratchet. The two pawls and latch operate alternately, allowing the crane to have a controllable release function of the cable. This makes it easier to unload the hoisted materials. Controllable and smooth.
The Covin people and the Ross people saw that just two people completed the transportation of heavy objects. Can cranes create greater miracles?
sure!
Finally, after a whole month of hard work, I have the final understanding today! February 2nd on the Julian calendar!
