Everyone looked at Li Ke subconsciously. A furnace of iron is 5,000 tons. How much steel do you want Datang to refine in a year? What? At that time, houses will be built with iron, official roads will be built with iron, and carriages will also be made of iron, right?
Do you still want to build an iron kite and fly to heaven?
The main reason is that Li Ke's predetermined goal is too outrageous. It is unimaginable to them that it is just 20 tons of iron for one furnace. If this efficiency is increased by 250 times... then the whole world will belong to the Tang Dynasty. .
"So, does the ironworks have to be moved to Chencang?" Li Shimin looked at Li Ke and asked.
"Yes, this is necessary, because in the future there will inevitably be a large number of supporting industries accompanying the steel plant, so this place is too close to the current Chang'an City and is inconvenient."
"It is very likely that the number of people around Chang'an will continue to increase in the future. This is one of the reasons why I asked people to move all the surrounding cemeteries."
"In the future, the city wall of Chang'an City may become a place to enjoy the scenery." Li Ke smiled.
Li Shimin rolled his eyes, what nonsense are you talking about? The city wall becomes a place to enjoy the scenery? Do you want to send someone to collect a fee?
"Is there anything else?" Li Shimin asked.
"Yes, let's go and see the place where industrial machines are manufactured." Li Ke said with a smile.
"What is an industrial machine?" New things often pop up in Li Ke's mouth. As the minister of the Ministry of Industry, Duan Lun feels that he must understand it immediately.
"Industrial machine is the machine that produces machines." Li Ke thought for a while and gave them a rough explanation. "I will use an inappropriate analogy. For example, a carpenter has saws, chisels, hammers, planes and other tools."
"When we put these tools together on a machine, when the cut tree passes through this tool, it changes from a log to a template. This machine combines all the functions of these tools."
"If we call these tools machines, then the industrial mother machine is the machine that produces such machines."
"We call this kind of machine a machine tool. It integrates different processes into the same assembly line, allowing one machine to have multiple processing capabilities and high precision."
"The products they produce may be almost identical within a certain range. This is the charm of industrialization."
Li Ke's explanation was very clear, but everyone was still a little confused. It didn't matter if they were confused, Li Ke took them directly to the machine tool factory.
Machine tools are a bit like robots. In some science fiction novels, an intelligent program creates a robot, and then starts to create robots through robots.
Machine tools are actually possible. You can build a machine tool to manufacture machine tool parts, and then assemble it to create a new machine tool.
Of course, Datang currently does not have many types of machine tools, mainly machine tools that produce various parts for steam engines.
Li Ke took them and quickly arrived at the Datang First Machine Tool Manufacturing Factory. This place looked completely different from the previous steel factory. Several steam engines were produced to drive the machines, and workers were operating the machines next to them. The relevant data is set on the scale, and then the steel molds begin to be cut one by one.
Seeing the steel being whittled into different shapes like ordinary wood, Li Shimin and the others were once again shocked to feel the charm of industry.
Before the Tang Dynasty, similar parts were either made using molds or hammered out bit by bit by blacksmiths. The former is very accurate, but the life of the parts produced by the mold is likely to be shortened due to substandard steel quality.
Although before Datang, there were not many parts that required the use of high-strength steel.
But now, these are all processed directly from special steel, and the processing speed seems to them to be extremely fast. Is this faster than some carpenters processing wood? Is this still the extremely hard steel?
After each part is produced, it will be continuously transported forward through a conveyor belt driven by a steam engine. Then, on both sides of the conveyor belt, some workers will inspect the parts and select the unqualified parts.
Finally, these parts are neatly put together.
Although it is incomparable to the assembly line operations controlled by real CNC machine tools in later generations, the efficiency may be dozens or hundreds of times lower. But for the current Datang, this speed is already very terrifying.
The parts are eventually shipped to an assembly plant, where workers assemble them individually.
"What is this machine being built for?" Li Shimin asked, looking at the machine.
"Your Majesty, what we are making now is a machine tool for final polishing to make the balls in the bearings." The director of the machine tool factory immediately replied.
"Rolling balls?" Li Shimin was a little curious.
There were samples here, and soon someone showed Li Shimin a few balls to look at. There were mainly two types, one was the cylindrical ball that was currently the most used, and the other was the spherical ball.
In fact, there are many types of ball bearings, such as deep groove ball bearings, angular contact ball bearings, cylindrical roller bearings, tapered roller bearings, aligning ball bearings, spherical roller bearings, thrust ball bearings, and thrust cylindrical roller bearings. , needle roller bearings, etc.
Currently, many of these bearings cannot be manufactured by Datang, and the accuracy of manufacturing is not that high, but models are available.
In fact, these cast rollers were not as precise as later generations, and their lifespan was naturally not comparable to those of later generations, but they were of great help to Datang.
There are not just rollers here, but complete bearings.
Seeing the bearings stuffed with cylindrical rollers rotating at a very high speed in the hands of the craftsmen, all the ministers immediately thought of the carriages they had updated.
The wheels of these carriages are much smoother than the previous wooden wheels. Obviously these are special bearings.
"These bearings can be used in almost all aspects of industry. For example, some heavier objects can also use large rollers and bearings to rotate and move. For example, there are large bearings under the large molten steel furnaces in the steel plants we have seen."
"In the future, these bearings may be used in any field we know, and this is just a trip in industry." Li Ke introduced it to everyone with a smile.
After visiting the industrial machine factory, Li Ke took them to see printing plants, paper mills and other factories.
Until the sun went down, Li Ke arranged another meal in the canteen of the last textile factory he visited.
Before eating, Li Ke secretly greeted Li Shimin, and Li Shimin naturally understood.
