I experimented for two days, and as I suspected, the sea grass wasn't very great for soda ash, but the vines with the float sacs, which I'm going to call float vines, yielded enough for the process to be worth it. The process involves burning the plants in a closed kiln, then dissolving as much of the ashes in water as I can. After that, I mix in slaked lime, which chemically pulls out a bunch of the other impurities, then I boiled off the remaining water, leaving me with soda ash, or sodium carbonate. The next step is going to be experimenting with mixtures of soda ash, silica, and lime until I make some decent glass.
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I spent two weeks tinkering with various different powdered rock alongside soda ash and lime, until I made a half decent mixture of glass. As it would turn out, if I powder lightstone as the basis for the glass, the final product comes out almost transparent when I add about 10% soda ash and 10% lime.
I got a little bold with some of the cast glass, and tried to stone shape it, which ended with an odd result. It initially seemed like it might work as bits of the glass seemed like they were moving like a liquid, similar to normal stone shaping, but quickly, the glass shattered into small bits, and any influence that I seemed to have on it was lost. I attempted to stone shape the shards, but they wouldn't merge back into one piece, they'd only move about trying to take the form I was trying to make.
Unfortunately, the whole glass making process is quite involved to get all the prerequisite components. I'll be able to make some for the window I wanted with some more work, but I'll probably need to teach a stone shaping goblin the whole process if we want to have lots of glass. Given we currently only have the one forge, I'd also need to make a new place for making glass. So for now, I'll table the idea.
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After three days, I'd made two moderately sized windows, which I installed in the documents room of the academy. During the daytime, they let enough light into the room that I can have the doors closed and still see plenty, so that should be enough for now. In an ideal world, all the windows in the whole building would be glass rather than just open holes, but I'd like to handle one industry at a time, and I currently have two others that are waiting to be developed.
Speaking of, the bargas are at the point where they could be sheered any day now, and the calves are getting big enough that they'll need separated soon. So my next course of action is to finally get working on developing felt. Not only will felt help with paper production, but it should be a step up from our current plant fiber clothes, at least when it comes to durability.
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Between sheering the bargas, and experimenting with their wool until I got a semblance of a useable product, I spent a whole thirty-three days on the felt making process. It really is quite involved to get a decent product out. There are a lot of intermediate steps, alongside many preparatory steps, which is why experimentation took as long as it did. Ultimately, I've succeeded in making felt, but as I worked with the wool, I realized that we should also be processing the wool down to use as strands, much like how we're currently using plant fibers. However, given my need for felt and our low amount of wool right now, that will probably have to wait for some time before I try to dive into that process.
Right now what I want to do from here is process all this wool into felt, so I can make felt sheets that I can use and re-use for paper making. Given the number of bargas we have right now, I probably won't be able to make as much felt as I'd ultimately like for making paper, but it should be a pretty good start. Plus I'll have to spend a few days experimenting with the felt as part of the paper making process to see just how much different the final paper result is.
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Turning all the sheered bargas wool into felt took a week, mostly because of my rudimentary apparatuses for doing the work. If I ever upscale the industry, there are a lot of improvements that could be done, and some automation would also go a long way. Then, experimenting with paper using felt sheets ate up another two weeks of time as I experimented with the paper some more as I worked through the improved process.
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Ultimately, the felt did allow me to make thicker, sturdier paper, and even the thinner paper was markedly higher quality. Felt has the ability to pull water out of the drying paper, allowing it to evaporate off more evenly allowing a more even drying process, even when sandwiched in an alternating pile of paper and felt. I'm quite pleased with the result, and I think it's time to ramp up production.
Thankfully, the construction crew has been busy working in the city itself for this time, and hasn't built the planned second mill yet. Before, I had just planned on making it a generic mill that could be adapted to whatever process I might want, but I want a paper mill now, and I don't think the previous building's layout will suffice for what I need.
What I want is a longer building, which has space for all the various processing needs for paper making, along with a area for drying the paper, which will need to be kept free from rain, while also having plenty of airflow. Sure, these could be two nearby buildings, but that would still shut the whole process down if it rained. So instead, I'm thinking of making a much more grand building. Given the number of machines that paper making takes, having two fans instead of one seems like a good idea as well. The whole building is going to end up taller than the first mill, just to make sure that the building isn't hit by the fan blades at any point.
That doesn't mean I won't be re-using a lot of the design though. I'm basically just putting two copies of the existing mill on top of a different building, elevating them. The blades on the first mill still need replaced with waterproofed wood that we'll need to make with the materials we got from the merchant. So I'll plan on making all the new fans at once, rather than separately. First though, I need to talk to the construction department to get permission to build.
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It was actually surprisingly difficult to get time to talk with Zeb, as he's been busy not only running the construction department, but experimenting with his own building designs. I didn't arrive early enough at city hall on the first day, and I didn't want to interrupt the work that was being done on the city, so I spent that day working on designs for the internals for the paper mill. It's a bit more complicated than the flour mill, since there is more than one machine that needs mechanical power. Instead of having all of them hooked up, I intend to make a gearshift to determine where the power actually goes from the two fans.
On the second day, I did catch Zeb before he headed out to work, and discussed my plans for construction. He was fine with it, but wanted me to mark it on the map that I'd made before. When I looked at the maps, I was surprised to see that many changes had occurred. None of them were drastic, but it seems like as buildings went up, some things shifted in their design, and they've been doing a lot of planning on where things should go.
When I finished with that, Zeb pulled one goblin from each of the two construction teams to help me with the project, which I appreciated. The construction teams have a decent number of individuals on them, so I didn't feel too bad about pulling labor away for my paper mill. For the city itself, it's getting to the point where Zaka will start summoning new residents, which means the construction crews will likely start switching some of their labor to expanding food resources again. We currently overproduce food, but that's on purpose, as underproduction is a significant issue when it comes to food.
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Thanks to all the things I'd learned while building the first mill, this second mill's construction came along much faster. Between the extra labor and the ability to pre-order a lot of the things necessary for the construction, rather than having to wait to show what I needed at each step, we managed to get the skeleton of the mill up along with the basic mechanical internals in twenty-six days. From this point, the construction goblins won't be any more helpful than regular manual labor, so I returned them to the construction department.
The only items left to make are the fan blades and the paper milling machines, along with their respective axles for driving them from their power source. For the fans, I just need to explain how to use the waterproofing material to the carpenter so that he can build those to standard. However, the machines are going to be a little tricky. I'm going to have to work with Karsh for a little while to manufacture what I need.