Before I tinue my pyrite experiments, I want to focus on finishing the lead produ process. Doing so should allow us to recover a lot of the iron and copper that we used for making artillery rounds, since we'll be able to s out the projectile portions of those rounds. Karsh also said he'd like to make all sorts of other things out of lead, si's so easy to work with, but I shot down that idea. sidering how simir our biology seems to be to Earth, I'm not risking lead poisoning. Maybe the biology on this p has an easy way to handle heavy metals, but I'd prefer to err on the side of caution.

  The final step for lead produ isn't that plicated, but it will require a slight ge in how the city currently handles some of it's refuse, bones in particur. What we o finish purifying our current lead acc to Konkur's notes is to melt it down in shallow tainers made from bone ash. That bone ash will absorb the lead oxide and leave behind a lot of other metals as long as we trol the temperature of the fire. Thankfully, he left a diagram for charcoal smelters that should produce the approximate temperature for the process.

  The metals recovered in this step are gold and silver, so those should be set aside for ter analysis, perhaps I'll get a letter with the samples posed, along with some payment, and send it to Konkur this year. I don't know if he'll look into it or not, but I suspect he will, as long as the mert actually get the samples sent to him. If this step has a very low yield, then it could potentially be skipped over for processing bulk lead.

  The step for rec the lead involves re-smelting the bone ash which is infused with lead oxides and other metal oxides like copper. It requires quite a bit of charcoal to reduce the metal oxides bato a mostly lead bullion. Finally, those bullioo be melted again at a low temperature he melting point of lead, leaving the other metals as a solid, and yielding a mostly pure lead metal.

  So, my course of a is to begin ging our handling of bone refuse, then to make the additions to the roasting area. One for the lead refining using the bone ash, and the other for re-smelting the lead. If this was aal other than lead, I'd probably build them iy, but given it involves w with lead, I don't want to potentially poison the ground water so I'm going to build it o the ore roasting area, where I already expect those sorts of problems.

  It took quite a few days to spread the word about separating out fish bones from your other refuse. It took even loo get the practice properly handled. Ultimately, I had to settle on a recyg program style system. Individuals could purchase a small bin for their fish bones, and when the bin was filled, you could trade the bones inside for a fixed sum of money.

  Getting that whole process anized ended up taking forty-three days, since I o hire a new goblin to hahe process, build a facility for processing the bones into bone ash, a Zeb to have one of his stone shaping goblins spend some time each year building more bins foblins to use for their fish bones. With that process do means we have a steady supply of bone ash, which should have a few uses outside of our lead refining needs.

  , I got to work on the area for the refining stage for the lead. I talked Zeb into lending me a stru team for ten days to ehat I fihe facility in time before this winter. In those two weeks, we expahe ft area around the roastiion to make enough room for the three new smelters, expahe roofing, and added another underground ste area.

  Then, I spent awelve days building the first smelter for refining the lead. With it finished, I took ahree days tinkering with the bone ash to e up with a good process to make the required tainers for seeping the lead oxide into. , I took aen days doing trial runs to get everything w in a reproducible way, so I could hire moblins to hahe process long term. In those ten days, I collected quite a few small samples of the impurities from the lead, which I carefully stored.

  The lead ingots from the inal smelter weigh approximately ten pounds each, and after running them through this stage of the refining process, I'd receive a little bead of metal that weighed just under a tweh of a pound. If I've done everything right, that means we're looking at about a half of a pert by weight yield of silver and/old.

  Using servative estimates of a 50% weight yield from the galena to our initial lead bullion bined with the five tons or so of galena we have to process, that'd yield about twenty-five pounds of these beads of silver. On one hand, it feels like a bit of a waste to do so much work for such a tiny amount of metal, but silver and gold both have pretty useful properties, and are somewhat hard to get, so it's probably worth it to tihis process.

  I'll have a feles bundled with some notes for Konkur, and hopefully he'll be able to get bae within a year to tell me if it's sidered eically viable to tihat recovery step. I took two days making a special package taining the samples, and w with one of oblins who could write in dwarvish to have them prepare a letter to go along with the samples.

  After doing those tests, I spent aen days hiring and training three goblins to hahat process moving forward. After that, I started work on the sed smelter, the one for re-f the lead bullion with it's impurities from the bone ash. This smelter o get up to a high enough temperature to reduce the lead oxide again, so it needs another windmill to get the air-flow high enough to produce the temperatures necessary for a redu rea to occur with mixed charcoal.

  Unfortunately, I had to halt stru temporarily, in order to handle our wirade again. Though I 't say I was too upset by the interruption, sidering I was expeg to potentially receive some of the crystal samples I requested. The mert also arrived fairly early, on the ninth of the month, so I didn't end up wasting that long waiting on this side of the isnd.

  I felt mixed emotions when I had only received a small tainer with three crystals in it. All three, I was told, produced heat when exposed to mana. I held one, and it did feel slightly warmer than I would have expected, so that at least made me believe it erf as advertised.

  Shasta was there to iate again, and also gave me a rough estimate for the number of warlords to expect at year's au. I was informed that eighteen had agreed to participate. Quite a few had deed, but if we included those who might still decide to participate, then we could expect up to twenty-five partits.

  We unloaded the metals we traded for this year, and reiated rade deals for the year. We didn't o trade for as many things this year, but to keep the mert happy, I ordered enough goods to make the trip more than worth it for him. The order sisted mostly of more metals, in addition to the usual goods like clothing. Given the number of warlords who might participate in the au year, I traded entirely in dwarven currency for this year's trade, to ensure we have enough trade goods to give as gifts at the au.