With the handful of trees we've felled I'll have enough wood to try making some charcoal after it dries out some. Until then, I've started cutting the wood into manageable sized pieces and ying it out to dry in the cave. In preparation for the charcoal, I think I'm also going to start making a rge amount of buckets for both transport and ste.
After a week, the wood is finally dry enough to try making charcoal from it. The ste area has been appropriately expanded as well, although some of the stone has only been hauled outside, and not yet pced into the pathway we're making. The reason for this mostly has to do with the work necessary in felling trees and clearing pnts that are in the way of the path. The frequent rains are finally starting to lighten up, so opportuo work on all that outside will beore frequent, and I'm hoping that we'll start making goress on that soon.
I start loading the charcoal kiln up, piling it full of wood. After a few hours of hauling wood to and from the cave, the kiln is nearly full, so I close off the front area, and go light a fire iop hole. If I remember correctly, whenever I see the fire through any of the air holes around the kiln, I'm supposed to plug them at that point, but not before. The whole process is probably going to take multiple hiven the size of the kiln, but ohe holes are plugged, I just leave it for a while, and open it at my venieer.
I'm having Zeb watch the holes while I work oing the rubble that I've been ing ed up somewhat. I'm just breaking it into pieces that are easy to carry, and bringing it up with all the stone from the ste area to be used for making stairs moving forward.
Well, it's been almost two days since we closed all the holes in the kiln, so I figure it's as good a time as any to open the kiln to see how well it went.
Overall, it holy weer than I thought it might for a first run. There is quite a lot of unburned wood left that be saved to use in arial run, and quite a bit seems to have been burned away, but we recovered a lot of charcoal from the process. sidering it started as multiple trees worth of wood, we've gotten a few hundred pounds of charcoal at least here. The b part is now filling the buckets with charcoal and moving them into the ste area. Once we've dohat I try my hand at loading up the fe and do some basic testing with it.
By the time we got the kiln all ed up, it was close enough to the end of the day that we decided to wait until today to actually start experimenting with the furnabsp; The first thing I o do is make myself a crucible a of stoongs for handling the crucible. For now I'll just make it from some of the excess stone for testing. Then I break some of the pieces of stoh embedded native copper and fill the crucible. Finally I load up the smelting furh plenty of charcoal, and ig, and Zeb and I trade off on turning the k to power the impeller f the temperature higher.
Initial results were... bad. The crucible cracked as it started to heat up, so I had to quickly attempt to remove it from the furnace, but it ended up breakiirely, and the copper and stone inside spilled out. Good news, it's hot enough to melt the copper. Bad news, it ran into the impeller and jammed the whole system up. It's probably going to take at least a day to the whole thing up tain.
ing and preparations for a sed attempt ended up taking two days. ing the forced air tubes and repairing the impeller took quite a while, and I wao try to make sure any future attempts wouldn't be as disastrous. I've decided to use some lightstoo make the crucible, and very carefully build the whole thing with stone shaping to hopefully eliminate any air or water withiohat might cause crag. I've also made ongs from lightstone in the same way. While I've been w on this, Zeb has felled some rees, so he's been prepping more wood for the charcoal process. His levels are getting up there, so it probably won't be that much longer until he prestiges again.
I've decided to leave all the tree cutting to him so that he get his levels faster. However, everything else is on hold for now because we have another experiment with metal melting about to start. The charcoal is lit, and we've started driving the impeller.
I slowly load the crucible into the furnace, keeping a close eye on it this time to hopefully react quickly if it cracks to save us the issue of having to out the whole furnace again.
Thankfully, it doesn't crack, and after a while, it starts to glow with heat. Ohe crucible is a warm yellow color, I remove it from the heat, a on a ft stone surfabsp; Which turned out to be a mistake. The thermal shock of the cold stone against the crucible cracked it right in half, and liquid copper seeped out, and began sputtering as it did so. Zeb and I bolted for cover, and thankfully her of us received any burns. However, it's obviously another learning experiehat I'll o think of a solution for.
Thankfully up this time only took a day. We're making goress, and I've made what I hope is a solution to the problem we've experienced. I've extehe vertical area of the furnace, and put a thick stone yer with holes sized for a crucible to rest in it. The hope is that it is high enough up that it will be at a cooler temperature, and thehe furnace is off entirely, the crucible will cool at a reasoe and not crabsp; Of course, then I'll just have a solid piece of copper at the bottom of a crucible, with a bunch of sg on top of it, but we're trying to solve one problem at a time.
As an additional bit of testing I want to do, I'll o refine a lot more lightstone. The reason being I want to make two hings. First, a stone scoop for removing sg from the crucibles as I melt metal. Sed, an ingot cast. The ingot cast I'm not sure if it will work, since we've been having trouble with thermal shock, but if it is detly sized, and pre-heated in the furnace, I'm hoping it will work. The ingots won't be too big though, since I want to be able to re-melt them down.
Since Zaka will be ba only three days, I'm going to just focus on lightstone refining until he visits , so I make sure that he be sent back with extra. Thanks to my new source of lightstone, I'm hoping that I have all the lightstone I'll need for everything by the time he arrives.
When Zaka arrived today, I was just finishing up my experimental ingot mold. I was also surprised with a gift from Zaka. The goblins he came up with were all carrying lots of smoked meat. Apparently, shortly after they returned from their st trip up here, anoblio a lizard attack, so Zaka decided to wipe out all the nearby lizards he could. For almost the entire month, the most skilled hunters and him have been going around killing all the lizards in the nearby areas. He said they've killed eleven so far, and it's gotten to the point that the smokehouse was pletely full, so they decided t us as much of the smoked lizard meat as they could, to make room for more in the smokehouse.
Well, I'm not oo look a gift horse in the mouth, so I gdly accept all this extra food. We spend a little time showing the hings we've been w on to the goblins. Simir to some other projects, Zaka actually has heard of copper smelting from his homend, although he's never seen any of it directly. When I asked him about other metals, it seems like there are some, like gold and some dull gray metals, although Zeb had a hard time with the transtion of this, so the most I gather is that they do at least have cepts of metalw.
By the end of the imp summoning process, Zaka heads back with two new goblins and his escoblins, so he says he'll be back agai month, and I send him off with more lightstone.