Spring was very rainy this year, which made it harder to work than I was expeg. The terrain where I've been w is craggy, as I've mentioned a few times, which means there are a lot of small but steep valleys with little ft nd. That meant that during rain, all that water from on the mountain would run down the cracks in the mountain, rushing quickly along. By the time it got down to the altitude where I was building, it would run very swiftly with a det volume behind it.
Ultimately, that meant that I had to build even more infrastructure around the area I was w to hahe water, and prevent it from damaging ores. Given the craggy terrain, I had been digging into the mountain to make ft areas that were easier to work with, and I had repced the floors with a few inches of solid lightstone. The i was to make a covered area, with eys that reach through the cover, to billow out the sulfur dioxide gas. I realized as the rains came that a simple gutter around the c won't be enough to hahe occasional torrent of water that makes its way down the mountain.
What I ended up spending a lot of time doing was redireg the water that would cascade down the valley. I tried a few things, like cutting a simple el around the area, but ultimately, I ended up asding a few hundred feet above the work area, and cutting a path from my bit of valley into the one over, and then making a wide and tall redire for that water. Due to the speed and volume of water during intense rain, anythihan a full redire was just resulting in mud, rocks, and pnt matter clogging any smaller scale structure. At least this should st quite a few years without much maintenance, and the previously cut els more than suffice for the rain that falls between the redire and the work area.
Though all that work meant that I hadn't fihe work area by the middle of the fourth month, and we moved the crystal back to the far valley to assist with all the city's stru projects. Though most of the rge scale work that I was doing was able to be pleted for the project at least. I also cut three detly sized ste areas into the mountain along the back wall of the work area, so that a fairly rge quantity of roasted and unroasted ores could be kept onsite.
At that point, all I had left to build were the roasting ovens and the windmill. For the windmill, I went for a size iween a well pump's windmill and the full sized ones by the coast. I once again had Karsh assist with the stru of pos, including a simple gearbox for allowing any of the four ovens to have their intake propellers powered or unpowered.
Three of the roasting ovens are of simir design to each other. Though one is rger thaher two. They tain a rge, round, ft bed where crushed ore be distributed with a shovel and special rake. From the back of the oven, a pipe asds into the heating area. That pipe tains the fan further away from the oven, to force air through. The front of the oven then close, to ehat esg gas leaves through the ey he front. When it es time to roast the ore, wood or charcoal is set on fire on top of the ore, and o's burning well, the door be closed. There is ara system that I installed o bed, that they then engage, which is a rge, ft stirring stick which fits in the diameter of the bed, and will slowly rotate, ensuring that the ore is well mixed.
The fourth oven is of quite a different design thahers though. Uhe others, where the resultant material is still a rocky substahis is the oven falena, where even a wood fire is likely to produce molten lead. That being the case, this oven is much more simir to the furnace up on the mountain, where crucibles be used to smelt the galena directly, and the lead be poured off to make ingots. Those ingots will be quite impure, and need reprocessing ter, uhey're used for certain materials, like artillery shells, where we only really care about their density.
Iure, those eys could be attached to a gathering chamber of some kind to collect the sulfur dioxide gas, but for now, they'll fun fine just venting to atmosphere.
By the time everything was plete, and I'd tested all the pos to make sure they'd work, it was the 18th of the 6th month, hly mid-summer. Which meant it was time to start doing a trial run of the sphalerite and galena, as well as giving the pyrite a try in one of the smaller ovens. Iime I spent while building this whole facility, the miself has started to decrease in productivity, and it's about to the level where I'm going to direct the minio start a new exploratory mine shaft.
The galena did partially melt to produce lead, but it also left behind a lot of sg materials, which I've decided to save. The density of that sg material is still quite high, so I suspect there are more metals trapped in it. Konkur's notes also mentiohat these ores are likely going to tain a mix of the other metals that be found in the area, so it'll take some work to purify them properly.
The sphalerite processi well, and, acc to Konkur's notes, it seemed to properly reduce the sphalerite to zinc oxide. For the pyrite though, I'm essentially flying blind. Though the pyrite powder did seem to ge from it's brassy color to a darker gray color during it's roasting process, so I'm taking that as a good sign that it has turned into an iron oxide from an iron sulfide. I'll do some experiments with the first batch of this once-roasted pyrite to see what kind of quality the resultant iron will be.
Overall, the facility here only produces some low-quality lead, and some partially processed ore materials for the time being. We'll need airely different facility for processing Zinc, as its processing has some extra steps, requiring a very high temperature furo vaporize the redug zinc oxide. The iron oxide made from processing the pyrite should be able to be smelted somewhat normally, however.
With the three roasting processes tested, I feel fortable with the idea of making a few perma positions for jobs of roasting ores, to start they'll just be roasting the galena and sphalerite. I want to wait until I'm fident in the pyrite processing before I leave it to some retively untrained individuals to work on, though.
I established a perma position for six goblins to work roasting ores. For the most part, the job is retively easy, sihe ores just o be loaded, then they roast retively unattended for quite a while. Most of their work es from hauling the product around. Basically, four of the six at any given time are hauling the ores while the other two keep an eye on the roasting ovens.
Iwenty days they've been w, I've started to notice the pnt life in the immediate surroundings, and especially downwind, has started to look uhy. Ultimately, that led me to make sure the goblins w at the site took turns being the ones hauling the ores, so that individually, they don't spend a long period of time in the area. I also decided that every five days, they should take two days off pletely, for health reasons.
I tried breathing both uhe rge covered area, and a little outside it, and the air is quite a bit worse outside and downwind than it is underh the c, so I'm not ed with trated poisoning at least. The roof does seem to be doing its job, with the wind generally pushing the gases away.
The first roast of the pyrite, however, didn't go as well. The resultant iron from smelting was extremely brittle, and barely useful at all. I suspect that the cause lies between impurities of other metals and residual sulfur. I have two options for attempting to fix the issue, though I'm leaning more towards ohaher.
The first option is attempting to fix the ore during the roasting phase. This would be difficult, because the amount of mixed in other minerals is actually quite high. The pyrite we're using isn't that pure, and has a lot of crushed rock mixed in. The sed option is a bit of a pain as well. Sihe iron is so brittle, it involves re-processing that iron again with a rge amount of charcoal to remove as much of the sulfur as is possible, while also attempting to to remove as many of the other metal impurities using lime, though we'd still have to do more to remove copper impurities if they're too much of a problem.