Chapter 685: The Trouble with Iron

Of course, while this blast furnace was a huge step forward in terms of industrial-scale ironmaking for the Rockwell Kingdom, there were still several issues with it to work out.

Material challenges were the biggest issue, with manufacturing and design issues coming next. There was also a need to find the ideal packing and loading procedures, as well as the exact timing to remove slag and molten iron from the furnace itself.

All of these problems could only be solved with more time and more experimentation, but there was one particular issue that the LBM Mark 2 could solve right away, the need for increased airflow.

While the LBM Mark 1s currently providing the ’blast’ for the furnace were excellent compared to traditional waterwheels, and certainly much better than hand-bellows, it was obvious that the LBM Mark 2 would be able to provide significantly higher airflow at significantly higher pressures, allowing for even more efficient iron smelting.

This would also allow for bigger blast furnaces to be built, allowing for even more iron to be produced.

Understanding this, Eda Mathews had essentially demanded that every available LBM Mark 2 Steam Engine built in Misty City be sent to Torren Ridge.

She even proposed setting up a new production facility in Torren Ridge to start building their own Steam Engines, a proposal Lucas seriously considered but ultimately rejected due to technical, security, and personnel limitations.

Still, since increasing iron production and, ultimately, the production of steel was one of Lucas’ chief goals as it would undoubtedly allow for greater industrialization to occur in the Rockwell Kingdom, he was more than happy to send all the completed LBM Mark 2s he could to Torren Ridge

Everything seemed to be on the right track when it came to iron production, but it wasn’t long after the blast furnace produced its first batch of iron that a new, tricky problem appeared.

Putting it simply, the iron that came out of Eda’s blast furnace was completely unusable as, once it cooled, it became extremely brittle, nothing like the flexible and ductile steel that she and Lucas both desired.

When Lucas heard about this, he quickly understood what the problem was; too much carbon and other impurities had been introduced into the iron by the smelting process.

Even Eda instinctually understood this, though she didn’t quite comprehend the chemistry behind it until Lucas took the time to explain it to her.

Nevertheless, understanding what the problem was and solving it were two entirely different things.

How to turn this ’pig iron’, as Lucas called it for reasons even he didn’t really comprehend, into steel sounded simple, they just needed to remove some of the carbon and impurities and voila, they would have steel.

Unfortunately, neither he nor Eda had any good ideas about how to go about doing this.

Apparently, in the iron-mill Eda had worked in in the Kore Sovereignty, while the initial step of smelting iron ore into pig iron was handled by ordinary workers, the actual process of turning that pig iron into steel was a tightly controlled secret that only the most senior smiths handled.

In other words, Eda and Lucas were just one step short of achieving their goal of mass-producing steel, but they had no clue as to how to take that step.

Of course, it wasn’t like the pig iron produced by the new blast furnace was useless; far from it.

They may not have known a fast and easy way to remove the carbon from this pig iron, but it wasn’t the first time Eda had dealt with it before. She knew that ’brittle iron’, as she had originally known it, could be packed into a crucible and then heated in a furnace until it melted.

Once the pig iron melted, you could turn it into iron by stirring it. In fact, if you were experienced enough, you could directly make steel this way by stirring just enough to remove only a portion of the carbon, but this was quite difficult.

When Eda told Lucas about this method, he quickly realized what was happening. The carbon in pig iron, when mixed with the oxygen in the air, was forming carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide.

In other words, they just needed to find a way to mix air and molten pig iron together to get low-carbon ’wrought iron’, possibly using some additional fluxes to remove other unwanted impurities along the way.

Once they had wrought iron, or pure iron, they simply needed to add back a specific portion of carbon, probably in the form of charcoal, to make steel.

When Lucas shared this insight with Eda, the two of them immediately thought of how the blast furnace introduced air into the molten iron and began looking into ways to replicate this process in a separate furnace, one that wasn’t directly exposed to coal or charcoal as that would simply add more carbon back into the molten metal.

Unfortunately, neither Eda nor Lucas had any knowledge of how to do this in an efficient and cost-effective manner. Clearly, it was going to take a while for them to work this problem out, so in the mean time, the ’stirring’ method of making wrought iron became the norm.

Steam engines helped greatly with this process, both when it came to moving heavy crucibles and with stirring the molten pig iron, and the amount of wrought iron and steel that could be produced in Torren Ridge was increased by several fold as a result, but compared to the literal mountains of pig iron the blast furnace could spit out each day...

In any case, all they could do for now was continue experimenting and consulting with other smiths while trying to find better solution to this problem.

It was disappointing and frustrating all at the same time, but Lucas had to remind himself that massive amounts of progress had still been made.

Honestly, the young boy hadn’t thought he would reach this point so soon, where just a year-and-a-half after arriving in Misty City he was producing qualified steam engines and was just one step away from mass-producing steel.

He was still a-ways away from building the massive steel-hulled ships he felt would be necessary to traverse the vast and dangerous oceans of Servist, but all-in-all, things were actually going quite well.

At this rate, Lucas figured that, if all went well, it would only be a decade or so before he could set out in search of his parents, which was far, far sooner than he had originally imagined possible on that fateful night.