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I gave Thom half of the ore I'd brought back, and he was suddenly depressed. It wasn't any kind of copper
ore he'd ever seen. The ore he was used to was red-colored, and a little heavier. I told him that it had to be
roasted over an open fire before it could be smelted, and he said that he would try it. But I could see that he
had grave doubts about the project.
I'd make a believer of him. I hoped.
I was lucky in that Tadeusz was back in Cieszyn from successfully starting a Pink Dragon Inn in Cracow. It
had already paid for its construction cost and was generating healthy profits.
He was absolutely delighted that the duke himself had requested a Pink Dragon Inn in Wroclaw, and vowed
that within the week he would leave for that city no matter what the weather was like. I gave him a letter of
introduction to the duke, sealing it with my big seal ring. I also told him about needing another small inn at
the copper mine near Legnica by the end of the summer.
Then I spent two days haggling with blacksmiths and carpenters to get the tools I needed. The duke's name
impressed everybody, and I got done in two days what had taken me two months last summer.
I also looked up the cloth merchant that I'd contracted with last summer. We made arrangements for
delivering the two thousand yards of cloth agreed upon. He wasn't happy about the deal, because the price
of cloth had dropped since we had agreed on the price, and he would loose money by honoring the
agreement. I wouldn't let him off, though. I never told him to be a capitalist!
Then back to Three Walls where people still weren't too clear about what had happened. It took a full day
with my foremen to settle out who would be going where to do what.
And besides all of the above, work was going on at Three Walls, and we had to agree on a schedule to keep
things going even though we were losing two-thirds of our best men and having to hire a bunch of rookies.
Most of those going to Eagle Nest would be coming back, but the transfers to Copper City would be
permanent.
I was having a wonderful time!
I had the new buildings drawn up in four days, largely because of Sir Vladimir's help. He was becoming a
good draftsman, and I'd make an engineer out of him yet.
But looking at the amount of wood that had to be sawn in a few months, it would take three of our walking-
beam sawmills to do the job at each of the new installations.
The quality of the work turned out by the brass works had been steadily increasing. It was time to try our
hands at a steam-powered sawmill.
We were casting pipes. A tubular boiler wouldn't be difficult. We were machining bearings and bushings.
Cylinders, pistons, and rods wouldn't be that much harder. We were making high-pressure water valves.
Steam valves should be possible.
The only hang-up was how to fasten the end-caps to the cylinders. I didn't see any way to do that except
with steel machine screws. The few screws we had made so far had been filed by hand, which was
expensive and not nearly accurate enough.
I needed an engine lathe to accurately cut screws and to make good taps and dies. And an engine lathe
needs accurate screws to feed the tool along the stock. I had to have a screw to make a screw!
I laid the problem aside, hoping my subconscious would come up with something, and worked on the rest
of the engine. We had to cut huge logs, two and three yards thick, so a circular saw would have had to be
six yards across. This was beyond our capabilities. We could probably make a big bandsaw blade, but such
a blade has to be very flexible, and I doubted the quality of our steel. I sketched up a big enough bandsaw
and it was huge, difficult to move, hard to make, and expensive. KISS.
Then I took one of our four-yard ripsaws and sketched a three-yard-long cylinder at each end of it. By
alternately pressurizing the rod ends of the cylinders, they would pull the saw blade back and forth. I set the
cylinders horizontally, so the machine wouldn't have to be built in a pit. A manually operated screw pulled
the log into the blade, and a mechanism for holding the log at the proper angle was straightforward.
A tubular boiler, a pressure gauge, and a safety relief valve came off my board within a day, and finally I
put the whole thing on wheels. It might take a dozen mules to move it, but at least we wouldn't have to
disassemble it to move it. In five days flat I had a complete set of drawings.
The world's first steam engine!
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But I still hadn't figured out how to make a good screw. Finally, I just drew up a simple engine lathe, even [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]