Chapter 217

Jean Agust was responsible for burning glass and blowing various experimental utensils. In addition to the proportion of raw materials, he was even clearer than the stone bear.

Brother Gai is responsible for burning lime. In this respect, Shixiong has no big advantage compared with him. The only advantage is the ratio of raw materials.

Anyway, these two things are left to them, and Shi Xiong is not worried that they will make any trouble. After all, these two things are not so difficult. As long as there are raw materials and people, it is almost impossible to do them wrong.

At the beginning, the stone bear had never smelted steel. Didn't he feel his way to smelt it?

As for Jack Williams and David Dean, they have more important things to do. They can't get involved in burning cement and glass.

Williams has made great progress in the research of all steel machine tools, and now all his mind is on this kind of all metal machine tools.

In fact, machine tools, like glass and cement, appeared very early. The earliest tree lathe appeared more than 2000 years ago, which can be said to be the rudiment of machine tool.

This kind of tree lathe is ugly, but it's really a tool to process things with the help of external force.

The main function of tree lathe is cutting. A platform composed of two logs is set up between two close trees. One log is fixed, and the other log is slightly thin and can not be moved, but can be rotated.

At this time, people will choose a tough branch from two big trees, and then tie the upper end of a rope to this branch. The rope will hang down and make two circles on the thin log. Finally, it will drop to the height close to the ground and pull a rope buckle. This kind of machine tool will be installed.

When working, the worker steps down on the rope buckle, and the rope drives the thin log to rotate. At the same time, he pulls down the tough branch at the upper end. Then the worker loosens his feet, and the tough branch will drive the rope to move upward, driving the thin log to rotate again.

The thin log is equipped with hard and sharp shells or stone knives. With the continuous rotation of the thin log, these shells or stone knives will cut the objects fixed on the fixed log, so as to complete the cutting of the objects.

This is a typical process of using manpower and branch elasticity as power to process objects.

You can take the fixed log as the bed of the machine tool, which is used to fix the workpiece; The thin log can be regarded as a work piece. The stone knife or shell can be regarded as a cutting tool. The rope is the transmission system. The worker's foot and the tough branch can be regarded as the power system.

This is the original tree lathe.

However, human beings are always developing, and lathe is also advancing with the times.

The tree lathe that has been used for N years can't always be hung on the tree, so in the middle ages, there was a "pedal lathe" which used a pedal to rotate the wooden crankshaft and drive the wooden flywheel, and then drive it to the wooden spindle to make it rotate, also known as the elastic bar lathe, except that the cutting tool was replaced by a metal cutting tool, The operation principle is as like as two peas.

In 1395, the real rod machine tool appeared in Germany.

About two hundred years after the appearance of rod machine tools, the Ming Dynasty in China published a wonderful book called Tiangong Kaiwu, which recorded various technologies of the early Ming Dynasty and the previous dynasties, including detailed records of grinding machines.

This kind of grinder uses the principle similar to the European medieval pedal machine tool, uses the pedal method to make the metal plate rotate, and works with sand and water to process jade.

Although this kind of grinder is called grinder, its function is not only grinding, but also cutting.

This kind of grinder has many kinds of tools, one of which is called "punching weight". The function of this kind of punching weight is mainly to empty the interior of jade. Its function is similar to that of modern boring machine. Another kind of tool is called Zhadu, whose main function is to cut jade.

Whether it is a tree lathe or a bar lathe or a grinding machine in China, the cutting tools are fixed. But later in France, an engineer named Besson designed a lathe to turn the screw by sliding the tool through the screw rod. Finally, the tool is no longer fixed in one position.

This kind of lathe already has the appearance of a modern lathe, but unfortunately, this lathe designed by Besson has not been popularized for some reasons. It is only used in small industries such as clock processing

At the same time, Da Vinci, the Italian legend, drew the conceptual sketches of lathes, boring machines, thread processing machines and internal grinding machines at the beginning of the 16th century, in which there were crank, flywheel, top and bearing mechanisms. But like Besson lathe, Da Vinci's design just stays on paper

In general, before watt improved the steam engine, lathes all over the world were at a very primitive level. This is mainly related to the selection of props, transmission system components and power sources.

Although design concepts such as Besson and Da Vinci have emerged, the real modern lathe has never appeared.

In fact, even Watt's improved steam engine, without the barrel boring machine invented by British John Wilkinson, Watt's steam engine not only could not be popularized on a large scale, but also could be regarded as a failure.

When watt improved the steam engine at that time, an important process was that he made a 38 inch thick steel cylinder. However, this kind of cylinder forged by manual hammering could really be called "full of holes", and the working efficiency was extremely low.

By this time, John Wilkinson had developed the world's first boring machine powered by a water wheel. At that time, Wilkinson made this kind of boring machine to process gun barrel, so this kind of boring machine was also called "barrel boring machine".

Wilkinson, however, after learning that Watt's cylinder processing was unsatisfactory, took the initiative to contact Watt, and then reprocessed Watt's leaky cylinder with his own barrel boring machine, finally meeting the requirements of real cylinder.

So Wilkinson began to cooperate with watt and became the only supplier of steam engine cylinders for Watt.

In order to bore larger cylinders, Wilkinson developed a cylinder boring machine on the basis of barrel boring machine to process larger cylinders.

John Wilkinson pioneered modern machine tools.

However, it is still nine years before Wilkinson developed the world's first barrel boring machine, and Jack Williams, the alchemist under Shi Xiong, has made a great breakthrough in the research of all metal machine tools.