Flowers in full bloom

Chapter 698: The Craftsmen Are Too Late

However, the quantity was far from enough, and the staff of the Ministry of Industry led their subordinates to work overtime to continue the production.

I don’t know if there will be a drought this year. There were several heavy rains in May, which filled most of the water in the dug ponds.

However, it has not rained in Changlanzhou since early June, and Hualei asked around in several surrounding provinces.

I found that the situation in Changhui, Changwu, and Changhuai was similar. The situation in Xi'an next door was even worse than here, with less rain.

It seems that drought is still possible this year! Therefore, Hualei immediately transferred the Anbang soldiers who had just dug the pond to Changwu Prefecture to help dig wells and ditches.

If it doesn't rain by mid-July, artificial irrigation will be necessary, so digging a well is urgent, the sooner the better.

Originally, ponds and wells were dug just to be prepared and prevent drought, but I didn't expect that they might come in handy this year. Hualei is both happy and worried.

I am glad that I have made some preparations and there is a certain amount of water in the pond. But I am worried that if a drought occurs and the disaster is serious, and I have not done enough, it will be very bad.

Fortunately, Anbang had a large number of soldiers, so the progress of digging the well was still very fast. However, the water truck, which was already late, was even later.

There was no other way, so Hualei assigned some helpers to help cut trees on the mountain and do some simple cutting work to ease the shortage of manpower in the Ministry of Works.

In order to prevent the impact of drought as much as possible, Hualei can only dispatch manpower to where the emergency is. However, even so, the speed of the water truck is still too slow.

If the pond and well can be dug, but there is no water truck, then irrigation will still be impossible! Hualei was still very anxious.

The rice was filling with grain and forming ears, and the corn was growing rapidly. They all needed irrigation, but the number of water trucks produced by the government office workshop was really a drop in the bucket!

As for the prefectures and counties below, Hua Lei couldn't count on them. A few days ago, the prefectures sent word that the number of water wheels that had been made was in the single digit. Alas! There were still too few craftsmen from the Ministry of Industry, Hua Lei sighed.

Some time ago, Hualei drew a diagram of a pedal thresher, and together with Rong Jin and Uncle Zhao, she tested the thresher. So the Ministry of Industry was even less manpower-intensive.

This was when Hualei was thinking about the vertical waterwheel. Suddenly, she remembered the model of the thresher displayed next to the vertical waterwheel, and thought about giving it a try to see if it was feasible.

The most primitive pedal thresher is generally composed of a wooden box, a pedal shaft, a pedal frame, a connecting rod, a large gear, a small gear, a roller shaft, a baffle, and threshing teeth.

The most difficult technology is the need for flexible linkage between various accessories, from the foot pedal to drive the connecting rod, to the final small gear to drive the roller, driving the roller to rotate, so that the threshing teeth on the roller can successfully knock down the rice.

In the past life, gear connecting rods were all made of iron, but here, they can only be made of wood. Fortunately, it is manually operated, so using wood should also be fine.

However, in order to improve efficiency, the small beating teeth on the roller needed to be made by bending iron bars slightly thinner than chopsticks. With the authority of the prefect of Hualei, a small amount of iron material could still be obtained.

However, if I want to make a lot of threshers, there probably won’t be enough iron. I thought of this too late.

If I had thought of making a thresher in Mobei, this problem would have been solved long ago. At that time, I was pregnant with Jinnian, and I had the will but not the ability, so I never thought of making a thresher.

I didn't think of it when I arrived in Xichang. If I had thought of it during the spring ploughing, I could have written back and asked my grandfather to help ask the emperor to solve the iron problem.

Although the first thresher has been made, if we write letters back, the time spent going back and forth will probably mean that we won’t be able to use the thresher this year.

You know, Hua Lei, Rong Jin, and Uncle Zhao had been working day and night for more than half a month to make the thresher.

At that time, in addition to the most important iron material, the most important thing to make the thresher work was the fit and interlocking of the gears and the technology that could drive the rollers to move together.

Fortunately, Rong Jin and Uncle Zhao had both made water wheels before. Relatively speaking, they were quite experienced in this area. In addition, Rong Jin and Uncle Zhao had already developed a tacit understanding.

One of the two people calculated the data, while the other cut the wood skillfully, and hammered and pounded according to the pattern drawn by Hua Lei.

After half a month of work and a lot of scrapped wood, the first thresher was finally completed. It is now placed in the workshop of the government office.

The finished thresher drum is about half a meter long and covered with iron teeth, which can be operated by two people side by side at the same time. Hualei personally tested it with rice.

Take a handful of rice, put it on the drum, step on the foot pedal with one foot, make the pedal move back and forth, and start driving the drum through the connecting rod and gears.

With a crackling sound, all the rice grains on the rice stalks splashed into the rice bucket. The speed is much faster than beating it with hands, and the key is that the threshing is cleaner.

Hualei was very satisfied with the clean straw and immediately sent the thresher to the workshop, ready to ask several masters from the Ministry of Industry to help make it.

Several old masters who were already busy making vertical well water wheels looked embarrassed when they saw Hua Lei's thresher.

As craftsmen, they were curious and excited when something new came out. But on the other hand, they also felt a lot of pressure, especially when they didn't have enough time to make the waterwheel.

But what to do? When the few people set out from Shangjing City, the Minister of Industry Li personally told them to fully cooperate with Hua Lei.

So, they split into two groups, one group continued to make the waterwheel, and the other group started to make the threshing machine. Although they had been working day and night, working overtime.

However, the speed of producing threshers was still too slow. So far, only one finished product has been produced.

There is only a month left before the rice is ripe, but there are only two threshers, and Hualei is getting anxious.

It would have been fine if I hadn't made the thresher by myself. Now that I have tried to make it, but no one is helping me to complete it, Hualei is feeling unwilling to accept the result.

At this time, she was sitting in the government office, looking at the map of Xichang Prefecture and thinking hard about a good strategy. When her finger slowly slid across the border of Xichang Prefecture, she suddenly saw the sign of the Xijiang military camp stationed on the border.

"Tongzhi Pei, Tongpan Wan, tell me, if I ask General Bai for help and have the Nufang Bureau make water wheels and threshers for Xichang Prefecture, will he agree?