The first private enterprise authorized to produce artificial gemstones in the country was located on the southwest side of Elta City and was named "Magic Stone".
This name is very common, but the company name registration system is only available in the Phoenix Kingdom. There is no one with the same name yet, so I picked it up.
The Magic Stone is five kilometers away from the nearest market in Elte, and the road to the bauxite mining area is more rugged, about twenty kilometers away.
The local bauxite mine was originally occupied by a group of bandits, who were scared away by the bandits along the railway line many years ago.
It was used here relatively early, and it was developed before Elta was incorporated into the kingdom.
Bauxite is a very basic magic material in the local area. It is very cheap in the eyes of magicians. However, in the eyes of Rainbow Metal, it is a bit expensive as the main raw material for aluminum smelting.
Fortunately, the hardness of bauxite itself is very low, which is on the same level as coal mines. The difficulty of mining is low, so the cost is limited. After the entire Fenggu sector belonged to the Kingdom, under the urging of Rainbow Group, the mining area carried out a wave of equipment upgrades, and the aluminum Soil prices have come down.
"Magic Stone" just picks up the ready-made bauxite production chain and uses different processes to produce it. Many of the equipment and technicians are seconded from Rainbow Metal.
Rainbow Metal is also a private company and will not make a loss-making business. Magic Stone signed an agreement to purchase chemical preparations needed for production from Rainbow Chemical in the future. When the price is lower than the border quotation, the procurement ratio will be no less than 70%.
The main component of bauxite is hydrated alumina. After crushing, the ore is initially washed to remove soluble matter, and then chemical agents are required to remove impurities.
After a series of chemical reactions and mechanical drying, what remains is hydrated alumina, which uses the same process as Rainbow Metal’s electrolytic aluminum.
Hydrate cannot directly enter the crystallization furnace. It needs to be turned into anhydrous alumina in a low-temperature furnace first. Then, as needed, seed crystals are planted in the mold, powder is filled and so on.
The entire process is very mature, and many furnaces have been tried during the few months of construction of the Magic Stone.
However, they have many ideas and have already started tinkering with new products before they are officially sold in batches.
The new product is also an alumina gemstone, the only difference is that it needs to be colored.
Gemstones that have flowed out of the country through various scrap channels have been well known to many people.
This kind of gem has a faint blue color under bright light, but when the light intensity is slightly lower, it looks colorless and transparent. It is a manifestation of extremely high purity and is very popular among mages.
But there is no color, so ladies and prodigal sons who like to paint don't pay much attention to it. They lack a strong purchasing power, which makes its price keep falling.
Now that Magic Stone is operating on its own, of course it wants to win more customers. The purchasing power of ladies is extremely exaggerated.
But it was a new company that didn't have its own technical staff. How could it get such high-end gadgets? It had no choice but to ask for help.
There is a good atmosphere for knowledge dissemination in the Kingdom, and companies don’t mind teaching them knowledge they don’t need.
To add color to gemstones, there are several options: chromium, cobalt, iron, and titanium. They must be added in the form of oxides or salts, not simple substances. The relevant knowledge of the first two is provided by Rainbow Metal, and the latter two are obtained from steel plants. When I bought it, I also went through an approval process.
Chromium is very strange. Chromium oxide is green, but when this component is incorporated into the alpha aluminum oxide crystal, it turns out to be ruby.
Cobalt is a typical precious blue. Almost all true blue mineral pigments and dyes contain cobalt. When added to gems, they will also make the gems appear blue.
Iron and titanium give different colors, but they can also be added. The principle can be referred to gem-grade rutile, which contains more than 98% titanium dioxide and contains iron. It will be very like ruby, and it can also be fine-tuned to produce a golden color.
You can also try adding nickel... In short, if the ratio is below 1.6%, which does not affect the low-temperature crystallization effect, you can try adding anything you can think of, just in case it performs well.
Magic Stone customized special molds specifically for experimenting with small gemstones of various colors.
This is also because the magic stone adopts the early low-temperature crystallization technology of around 1800 degrees. Large gemstones will have polycrystalline imaging cracks, and only small ones can look more like natural gemstones.
Using special molds, hundreds of small gems can be made in one furnace, each with slightly different ingredients. After trying it for a while, they actually came up with something good.
Forget rubies and sapphires, they are too common and not competitive with natural gemstones.
The most powerful ones are a star color and a pink gemstone.
The main body of the star color is a slightly purplish low-saturation sapphire, cut into a standard eight hearts and eight arrows. It is a 57-sided craft body, and each side will present four colors of transparent, white, red, and blue at the same time.
Pink gemstones highlight a pink color and are more like transparent gemstones in color.
Both are varieties that will definitely make a man go blind and a woman drool.
"Okay, okay, okay."
As a shareholder of the Magic Stone, the former Lord Elte saw the two new types of mass-produced gemstones. He praised them, but his heart couldn't bear it.
It has been more than 200 years since the city of Erte was founded, but they didn't even know that the bauxite at their doorstep could be used to make gemstones, and that they could make such thrilling gemstones.
I feel like I’ve lost hundreds of millions!
gold!
Now that it is produced, it cannot actually be sold at a high price. It is just used to distinguish it from the main products and be sold as a high-end product.
By the way, the ordinary artificial gemstones produced by the Magic Stone are different from those produced by the gemstone workshop of the steel factory.
The products there can only appear blue under sunlight, and the basic color cannot be seen under indoor lighting. The basic gemstone of the Magic Stone will be reddish when there are enough indoor lamps, but the red will be a little lighter under sunlight. .
The invited alchemist said it should be due to impurities.
As a magic storage item, color differences and even cracks on the cross section do not affect its use. However, this difference also prevents the magic stone from displaying some strange signs.
The official domestic recommended retail price is 500 yuan per kilogram.
...not counting the investment in building the factory, only counting the portion from raw materials to finished products, and the profit is at least 800%.
But it actually contains money that needs to be used to supplement other work, namely the corundum abrasive project copied from the motorcycle factory. The situation at the General Motorcycle Factory is different. They purchase gamma-type alumina directly from Rainbow Metal. They do not need to start with bauxite, and the cost is also relatively high.
Corundum abrasives and artificial gemstones are the same thing, but the crystal size is different and the temperature requirements are lower.
Low-temperature artificial gemstones are said to be polycrystalline, but are actually giant-scale single-crystal combinations. Corundum abrasives are truly tiny polycrystals that appear as white irregular-shaped particles.
Reducing the market price of corundum abrasives is the only official requirement in the entire artificial gemstone civilianization project. Under the premise that the entire project is equivalent to giving money away, there is no way not to agree.
The official guideline ex-factory price of corundum is 2,000 yuan per ton, which is twice that of crude steel. With the current scale of Magic Stone, it will be a complete loss. Only when it reaches an annual output of about 50,000 tons can it make a small profit.
The question is how can we achieve an annual output of 50,000 tons? Who uses it? When sold overseas, it is a matter of suspense whether those people can distinguish between Alpha type and Gamma type, let alone bulk purchase.
The former lord’s adviser helped with the analysis and believed that the properties of corundum have great advantages over traditional abrasives. The low price has cultivated the habit of using corundum in domestic enterprises, making them feel that washing and reusing is a waste. As the population of the kingdom increases year by year, a It is not impossible to consume tens of thousands of tons per year.
In short, the current stage is to subsidize this side with low-priced gems.
The export part is limited by transportation capacity. There is no point in exporting corundum powder. Gems are more reliable, but the official does not seem to have supporting measures to restrict foreign merchants from purchasing within the country.
If the takeaway here is 1,000 yuan per kilogram, others will naturally go to the mainland to find agents to purchase at home, but it is impossible for me to shut out domestic buyers.
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Therefore, the first batch will only consider domestic matters, and wait until the market becomes saturated before considering overseas matters.
