A newly established subsidiary of Rainbow Group is busy with tasks from above.
Most businessmen are annoyed by official tasks. Either the risks are unreasonable or they have to lose money. The situation in the Phoenix Kingdom is a little different. Factories that can receive official demand will become rich later, so everyone is very active.
Unfortunately, positivity cannot turn into results, it requires luck and means.
After Caihong Metal (Fenggu Nonferrous) and Caihong Chemical gradually got on the right track, Caihong Group got a new demand, the research and development of truck tires.
The directors of Rainbow Group couldn't figure out why they asked themselves to make tires, but thinking that there must be a deeper meaning, they gathered a group of people to do the preliminary work first.
Once the preliminary work was done, I found that it was indeed a big business.
There are currently 500 steam vehicles in the kingdom, and 2,000 tires are needed here. Not counting the metal wheels used by Blackwater's steam cultivators, the number of classic cars is about the same as the number of steam trucks in the territory.
But in fact, this is not a big deal. According to the official demand indicators, if these load wheels are made smaller and installed on ox carts and horse carriages, they can still effectively increase the load and reduce vibration.
After careful calculation, the overall market size is actually much larger than that of non-ferrous metals.
Non-ferrous metals are useful except for a few domestic factories. Aluminum and copper have certain sales overseas, but many types are not recognized at all. For example, few people outside the country are willing to buy the good manganese and nickel sold domestically. The buyers who occasionally come into contact are all alchemists. How much of the upstream products of industrial production can the alchemists digest?
Tires are different. As long as they can be made, there is ready demand everywhere, and you can make money just waiting for transportation.
With the expectation of making a lot of money, Rainbow Group became more interested, but there was still a problem...it was still money!
When Rainbow Chemical was building the plant, Obsidian Bank supported it with four million, and they also chipped in a lot. However, a few million can actually only build the basic production capacity of a chemical plant. The money earned from subsequent products will need to be expanded and provide for Rainbow Chemical. Metals updated its production equipment, and the directors didn't even pay dividends this year.
Now that I have to create something new, I feel a lot of pressure.
After several rounds of discussions among the directors, they had to introduce external funds and cooperate with large investors in Lukou City to launch the project.
In addition to being an east-west and north-south railway gathering point, Lukou City's own industry is not mature and it mainly relies on border trade to make a fortune.
Pure border trade is not well-received at the official level. No one will ask if it is a loss, and no one will care if it is a profit. In fact, the big players here really want to establish relationships with government-owned enterprises.
Although Rainbow Group is not government-run, it is still a key enterprise under official guidance in production. Many people responded to their greeting.
Don’t worry about the company name now, wait until you have a clue about the product.
After the people on both sides teamed up, they followed the official guidance and pushed forward in two directions. On the one hand, they found alchemists to cooperate, and at the same time, they invested in research and development commissions for the Red Stone Magic Equipment Factory. On the other hand, they sent some people to Quagmire City to find a solution.
These two lines are related to the same thing, artificial rubber.
The rubber does not have to be rubber, as long as the properties are similar.
Officials do not have specific production guidance for artificial rubber. They only say that some gas products of petroleum can be polymerized into rubber at low temperatures.
There is no concept of rubber in the penal colony, but they can understand what kind of material it is from the few black tires of unknown origin sent to them by the heavy industry. One of these tires was cut into small pieces and sent to various partners.
Making tires is not just rubber, there are many other things.
With ready-made tires as a guide, Rainbow Group realized that the tire factory was actually a final assembly plant, similar to a car factory.
Rubber is just the binding material of each layer of the tire and the outer part of the tire. The properties of the outer tire and the inner layer are not the same. There are already resin-processed products that can replace the inner layer, so I first got some equipment and tried to do some internal work. sample.
There are very considerate instructions in the official guidance document.
Their first goal is to directly produce radial hollow tires. Hollow tires are also called vacuum tires, which does not mean vacuum in space, but means "true hollow". There is no inner tube, and it relies entirely on the outer tire and wheel hub with a composite layer. Combined with the structure to create air tightness, air pressure acts directly between the wheel hub and tire.
There are reference points for the structure of hollow tires, and the air-tight ridge of the wheel hub is not a magical thing. The only difficulty is that synthetic rubber is necessary, because only synthetic rubber can achieve sufficiently high air tightness and low water permeability.
But if they still can't find a synthesis method, or if they can't mass-produce it, they will turn to a structure where the inner and outer tires are separated.
The advantage of the separate inner and outer tire structure is that the inner tire is only airtight, and the outer tire is only waterproof and wear-resistant. The relative material level is lower, and it is easy to find substitutes.
For the inner tube, you can ask the boatbuilders on the Luna River for help. They have many secret glues to ensure air tightness. Just choose a few with better temperature resistance and try to make further improvements.
However, the outer tires still need to have something similar to rubber, otherwise the grip will not be enough and the load will be out of the question.
The tires currently used on steam vehicles can also carry heavy loads, but the damage rate is still high, and there is no way to popularize them... Of course, the scale of mass production is not enough.
In short, while searching for rubber and its substitutes on a large scale, the Rainbow Group first figured out the rest. When the new Pettus City was built, they even made tires without rubber layers that could run on the road.
This kind of tire is made of cord plus steel cord, mixed with a resin modification with a certain degree of softness. By stacking the layers of cord and steel wire, it can achieve quite high strength and elasticity.
But this kind of tire still cannot be used. There are two problems. The first is that it is not wear-resistant. As long as it is loaded on a steam car and runs around the city for a few times, the cord and steel wire layer will wear out, and the soft resin itself will wear away. . The second is that there is a problem with the air tightness. If a steam car is kept fully loaded, the tire pressure will drop significantly within 30 hours after the tire is inflated, causing the tire to have visible deformation in appearance.
A truck is not a wooden truck. If a wooden truck uses inflated tires, it does not need too high tire pressure. The tire pressure of a truck must be above 0.5 MPa. Even if the number of tires is increased, the value will not drop too low. If you need to use all the tires every day, If you cheer up, everyone will be beaten to death.
At this stage, Rainbow Group was a little anxious.
All the work that I can do has been done, and I am just waiting for the rubber to fall to the ground... Whether it will land or not is still unknown, which makes people even more angry.
There is no news about rubber, and it is impossible to even build a factory, because it will take time to expand rubber production capacity. Now building a factory is just waiting to grow a spider web.
They didn't even know that Xincheng Heavy Industries had been having a headache with rubber for several years. They had made a lot of efforts and saw no sign of success.
A group of anxious and angry directors kept asking questions about this every day, and some even brought a group of security guards to live directly in Nanpang Xuncheng.
It's not enough to just go there, you also have to have a product, synthetic ammonia.
Ammonia is the preferred refrigerant in the low-temperature industry at this stage. It has the advantages of low cost and simple equipment structure. The disadvantage is that ammonia itself is a dangerous gas, and it cannot be promoted under the high safety standards of the small kingdom.
The relevant ammonia cooling device was invented by the chemical factory itself... Of course, the knowledge gained from the research bureau.
As product lines become more complex, chemical plants have their own temperature control needs. Temperature control requires not only high temperature control, but also low temperature control.
Its structure is quite simple, that is, liquid ammonia absorbs heat and evaporates, and gaseous ammonia is sprayed with water in the pipes outside the production area while blowing air. The heat dissipation pipes need to be pressurized to remove heat, so that the temperature of the pipes drops to a level where the ammonia can be liquefied (normal temperature) .
Synthetic rubber requires lower temperatures, and wind power provided by pure manpower can no longer meet the heat dissipation needs. Electricity and a refrigerant that is more resistant to low temperatures must be used for heat exchange. However, there is a lot of fuel in Quagmire City, and it can be used with steam generators that have been retired from power plants. Done.
