Although we said we were going to hurry back to look at artificial minerals, we still did our due diligend finished colleg samples from all the areas along the way back down the mountain from the cave. By the time we got back, it was te enough that we agreed to wait until the day for me to uhe artificial minerals.

  So, that night, I made a sample of the three artificial minerals I'd made in the past. Lightstone, darkstone, and the reddish-brown stohat I fouhe entrao the cave. Now, there might actually be examples of these minerals that he knows about, but I manually refihem with stone shaping, and in fact, I still use lightstone occasionally for things that I need exceptional durability a properties, but still want to use stone for.

  The day, when I brought those samples over, Konkur determihat he'd o do a lot of experiments to determihe exact properties of these stones. Food measure, I showed him the process by which I refihe minerals, and he was quite impressed stating, "This is the sort of tradeoff I mentioned when I made the eerday when I pared how you mih how dwarves mine. We're quite good at bulk excavation, but detail work like this using magic is impossible. The idea to do something like this manually would be impossible as far as I'm ed."

  It seems that there is already some form of established Mohs hardness scale here, although its not called that and the scale goes to a value of 16 instead of 10. Diamond is still at the top at 16 though, so it seems like the whole scale is just shifted around. On this scale, pure Quartz crystals are an 11, making lightsto just over 10, actually quite hard. Darkstone, by parison, falls at a bit over 5, making it fairly soft. The reddish-brown stone was at a 6, also fairly soft. I already had a bit of an intuitive uanding of this, but getting the actual tested numbers on this was quite useful.

  He did a few other basic checks on the minerals, such as density checks and basic stress tests. Simir to what I'd found, lightstone had a lower density thaher two, and seemed to have better resistao stresses and impacts. Acc to Konkur, "It has quite a few desirable properties, and is on par with some very high quality building materials. It's too bad it's on an isnd, so exp it would be very impractical."

  With a handful of neles to research, I left Konkur to study those for a few days while I would go work on other projects.

  One project that I had thought we might doing before, which I've now decided we should actually get a facility made for is gss produ. It doesn't o be a rge facility, but getting it all anized in one pce, aing a stone shaping goblin to work on it might be useful. A lot of the various facilities, let alohe houses, would be from having transparent gss, so I think it'll be useful. For the past six days, I've been finishing up the gss making area, minus the maes it'll need.

  I hadn't goo much detail before as to the exact process I went into to make the gss, since I sort of improvised certain tools to achieve the desired results. Now though, I'll o actually make the right tools for the job. The area I've been making will be quite simir to Karsh's smelting workshop, except a lot of the areas that would normally be used for handlial will be repced with corresponding tools for handling gss.

  I'd like for there to be gss blowing tools and other quality shaping tools avaible, as prssware is essential to preventing ination when w with pure materials. In a perfect world, I'd even be able to make a gss vacuum chamber so I better observe the decay of crystals, and the process of growing them. Of course, that level of precision and material sce is still a long ways away from what roduce right now.

  To aid in produ, the gssmaking workshop will also get their own stone crushers, which will ultimately be sized such that it should make very fine sand grains. Ultimately, what I'd found was that lightstone is a good base for making gss. Just crushing it teically wasn't enough though. I also fluidized it to separate the differey grains. Manually, this involved an improvised pan, and I operated it like you would fold panning. Unfortunately, quartz isn't that much more dehaher particles in the lightstone, so it took quite a lot of effort to remove it.

  Manually doing this with water and a pan takes quite some time, and I'd much rather make the two maes necessary to process this in bulk instead. The first is a particle sieve, with various mesh sizes stacked frest to smallest. By p the ground up lightstohrough the sieve and maintaining vibration in it, all the particles will be sorted acc to the size of the mesh they pour through. For these meshes I'll need more wire to make them big enough to handle rger bulk processing.

  Also, due to the very small density differences in the particles, I'll o make these meshes precise from oo the . Probably less than 5% differen particle volume, meaning a little less than 2% differen particle radius. Doing this by hand would be impossible unassisted, but there is a pretty spatensive way to ma. By using a simple lever arm and a slide, aending it much further than the edge of the mesh, what might have been a huh of an inch differe the edge of the mesh instead be an inore at the end of the arm.

  Of course to achieve this, I'll need an exceptionally long lever arm, at least 100 times the radius of the mesh, or more depending oly how fine I want the mesh to be. Initially, I thought I might just build it in the open, then tear it down when I made the meshes, but sidering how they'll be used, they'll probably need rept every so often. Building it underground is an option, but we'd also need pretty good light to work with. I'm currently thinking about building the facility deep in the cave, and lighting it using crystals.

  The crystals don't produce that much light on their own, but if I paough of them into the walls, I could probably light the area pretty well. Plus, only two areas actually o be lit. The area where the meshes are made, and then the far end of a wide e where the end of the lever arm sits. The iween area doesn't actually need much lighting, and you won't be reading any measurements or building there.

  Ohe mesh process is dohe sed step is to then put all the simirly sized particles inte vibrating tube, so that the particles separate themselves out by density. This, paratively, is much simpler, just needing some gears to drive vibration iube. Then, quartz sand be collected from the separated bed to be used for making gss. The other mineral sands might actually be useful too, depending on their positions. Feldspar is useful as a flux for some gss making as an example, but without further testing, it would be hard to determine what materials we have.

  Thankfully, we now have a mineralogist here on the isnd, and I'm guessiing access to this equipment would probably be a pretty useful boon to him as well, si helps you separate out positional materials from rocks. Hopefully, he'll be able to also determine some useful properties of those pos. As I go to begin the work of digging out the room in the cave on the mountain, I'll o be izant of time, as in about three weeks, I have my first csses at the academy to teach.