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!
But I still hadn't figured out how to make a good screw. Finally, I just drew up a simple engine lathe, even though I didn't see how we could possibly build one. By this time, we had pretty much duplicated the machinery from the brass works at Three Walls, complete with pigs in huge hamster cages turning the lathes, so I gave the drawings to Ilya and told him to make me one.
Ilya was a good man at a forge, but he didn't have the machining experience of the Krakowski brothers. I gave this difficult project to him because the Krakowski brothers were reasonable enough to ask questions until they understood something, and I didn't have the answers to match their questions.
Ilya, on the other hand, was never reasonable. His ego was such that he would never admit that there was anything that he didn't quite grasp. He was belligerent, intolerant, and bullheaded, but he wasn't stupid.
The engine lathe would be the most complicated piece of equipment we owned, but I gave the project to him as casually as if I was asking for an axe head. I simply explained what it did and why, and asked to have it done as soon as possible. He stared at the drawings for a few moments and then said that if I wanted the silly thing, he'd build it.
For the next five weeks, it was hard to get anything else out of the blacksmiths, and repair work was done only grudgingly. I finally had to step in and split the section into a forging group and a machining group, just to keep the carpenters and masons in tools.
At one point I was walking through the plant and saw
Ilya carefully wrapping a woman's bright red ribbon around a smooth brass rod, and carefully scribing on the brass where the top of the ribbon came to as he went along. I didn't say a word.
Another time I saw him deliberately pouring fine sand on a set of running gears, while on another machine one of his assistants was running an iron nut back and forth on a long brass screw. The nut was in two halves and clamped back together, and it too was dusted with fine sand. The assistant said that he had been doing this boring work for two weeks, but I didn't want to get involved. If Ilya somehow did the job, great. If he fell on his ass, the humiliating experience might make him easier to live with.
But Ilya. did it. The engine lathe worked better than I had expected, and Ilya's ego was so monstrous that he wouldn't even accept praise for it. He pretended that he could do that sort of thing every day. So I put him in charge of making the steam-powered sawmills, and told him not to take so long this time.
Most modem factories are built on flat, level land. My material handling equipment was limited to men with wheelbarrows, and the coal came out of the mountain several hundred yards above the valley floor. I used the slope of the valley walls to help out.
From the tunnel mouth, loads of coal were dumped in a pile almost at the door. Below that was a cleaning and sorting area and the tops of the coke ovens were lower still. I built the top of the blast furnace lower than the bottom of the coke oven, about level with the entrance to the boys' cave, where the iron ore came out.
It was still wheelbarrow work, but at least we didn't have to push stuff uphill.
Ilya was vastly skeptical about using anything but charcoal to make iron, but I bullied him into it and with our coke and our iron ore, he eventually turned out decent wrought iron. He insisted that charcoal was better than coke, especially for the cementation process of making steel, but that last took very little charcoaL
As soon as the weather broke, the masons were busy assembling the blast furnace. They had been cutting sandstone blocks for it all winter long, and we had good supplies of coke and iron ore.
After five days of steady burning, we made our first pour, knocking in the clay plug with a long iron rod, and getting out of the way as a long stream of molten iron sprayed out. After that we tapped it four times a day.
Chemical engineers often refer to themselves as "bucket chemists," as opposed to the "test tube chemists" who work in laboratories, because they often do their experiments with large quantities of chemicals. Reaction rates and sometimes even the end products can vary depending on the quantities used, so these people mix things by the bucketful.
I was a bucket chemist of vast proportions. I got the blast furnace going by building a full-size blast furnace and experimenting for months with the quantities of coke, ore, and limestone required. What little iron we turned out in those first months was simply tossed into a pile for later refining, because it wasn't worth much in its present state.
It was simply that there was no way of doing things on a smaller scale, not without some way of measuring temperatures. Brute force had to substitute for finesse *
Did we need more air in the furnace? We didn't know. Build more bellows, put more people to pumping them and see what happens!
At first, all we could do with the pig iron was to cast it in long troughs formed in the sand, but we could always melt it down later by throwing it back into the furnace. I had Mikhail Krakowski come down and set up our casting operation for us. He used the system he knew, pouring into hot clay molds rather than the sandcasting used in modem foundries. But it worked, and I saw no need to change things. If anything, he got a much better surface finish using clay than I had ever seen using sand.