Road to the Crown

Chapter 125: Figuring out a proper steam engine

22nd April 1574

With everything regarding the Steam Horse already set in motion, there was no need for me to linger around. After making sure that I pushed as many people as it was possible into laying down the bricks, hauling them towards the construction site and preparing the mortars, I split the remaining group into two, sending one of them right back to cutting down trees while tasking the other one with the long and mundane job of digging up the huge area of ground, of a perfect, one hundred by one hundred meters square (110yards).

Just the volume of the ground that I wanted them to excavate would be enough to create an insanely huge pile of earth, so to make the task a bit easier, rather than going entire one meter down to the ground, I settled with half of this depth, while ordering them to stack the uncovered earth at the boundaries of the excavated pit, to make up for the remaining part.

With the enormous size of the ditch I wanted to create, I knew that outside of about three thousands working hours required to dig this entire thing out, I still need to give my workers time to reinforce the wall of the pit to prevent it from collapsing during the first rain that would come.

Overall, just this test grounds for the future city that would hopefully be later expanded into a proper settlement, would take at the very least a week if I dared to push all my workers into this task, or about two weeks if I did it in a realistic way. But in the harsh reality, if that project was bound to make any sense, doing it over a span of an entire month with my current workforce, would be the best approach, since as soon as the steam horse would near the end of its construction, all the other kinds of projects would be started!

At first, a proper smithy with a steam-powered air intake. As long as I could get one to start melting the ore provided by the mines, all the problems stemming from the lack of tools could be solved almost instantly, by making some makeshift forms from the excavated clay and turning them into a solid cast of whatever I wanted to make.

On the other hand, there was the enormous project of the limestone quarry, required if I wanted to even start thinking about making any reasonable amounts of concrete. Yet contrary to the smelting which could be done with just a single steam horse, this kind of quarry along with the basic crushing tools would require at least a few of them to provide enough strength to crush the rocks.

But when I thought about it for a slightly longer time, I realised that I missed quite an important point!

There wasn't a single reason to stick to the inefficient design of the atmospheric steam horse! While it was far easier to build than the proper engine, as long as I could create proper casts of the parts I required to assemble a pressure-based engine, all the power needs for the quarry could be solved with just a single steam horse of the new design!

"Fuck where did I put my papers"

With this idea hitting me like a hammer, I ran back to my tent, rummaging through my luggage for as long as it took me to find some spare sheets of clean parchment before throwing it on the ground and kneeling right in front of it with yet another piece of charcoal. Unwilling to waste any time on looking for the handle, I had to compromise with the fact that my fingers instantly turned black, as if I spent my entire life in the mines!

"Since I need it to do a lot of work, I will need to make it big"

With the possibility to cast all the parts that I required, as long as I would find some sort of lubricant to keep the cylinder parts from wearing off, crafting one was actually fairly easy.

Taking the boiler out of the picture as keeping it would only complicate everything even though its function was just to create steam from the water, the design remained quite simple.

Consisting of a huge working chamber, fitted with only a long rod and cylinder plate mounted on it and two openings at its both ends connected to the upper part of the engine, the way it worked was insanely simple. When the steam entered through one of the upper holes, it would move the cylinder plate in one direction. Upon reaching its maximum extent, the hole that so far provided the steam would turn into the way for it to escape the system, while the hole on the other end of the cylinder plate would start injecting the mechanism with steam once again.

It was how this process was automated that proved to be difficult. By placing something aking to a thick tube, just slightly longer than the cylinder chamber itself, not only it had to be fitted with two holes at the bottom perfectly aligned with the openings of the cylinder chamber, but with three more openings at its top!

The two of them, carved right at the opposing ends of the tube, would only serve as the way to exhaust the used steam out of the machine, while the hole placed right in the middle of the upper side of the tube, was only responsible for infusing the system with more of superheated steam. But if that was all, then the steam would just instantly escape the system through the exhaust holes, never exerting any force on the cylinder plate!

That's where the most important and most difficult to craft part came to the picture.

A long rod, fitted with two, thick cylinder plates, that depending on its position inside the upper tube, would always keep either of the exhaust holes closed while shifting the entry for the pressured steam between left or right bottom hole.

This way, as soon as the bottom cylinder would be pushed far enough, its current intake hole would change to the exhaust one, while the flow between the so-far closed bottom hole and the steam intake would be opened, allowing for the cylinder plate to be pushed in the opposite direction!

Even though in terms of crafting the parts, creating a proper lubricant to allow for a smooth movement and isolation between the cylinder plate and the cylinder itself, it was connecting the cylinder rod with the rod that controlled the exhaust mechanism that was the most difficult!

While connecting them and making sure that the ratio between how far they would move was fairly simple by using a wheel and a crank to connect the two of them, with the distance from the centre of the wheel that would determine how far one rod would be moved in relation to the other, but finding the perfect spot that would allow for correct automation was something that I didn't dare to take on myself!

Looking at the blueprint now written down on the piece of paper right in front of my eyes, I realised that drawing something and building it from a scratch wasn't even comparable when it came to building part!

That's when I realised that no one was pressuring me to finish this new machine!

I could take as much time to build it as I wanted, with the power of the governor and most likely the influence of the Michal Cherrie being more than enough to shield me from the incoming times of trouble!

That's why, rather than trying to make an engine from the scratch and nail it on the first attempt, why not build a model, cut perfectly in half, that would allow me to get the ratios right, and simply replicate the model but along with its other side?