I was able to work with Shasta some more on my dwarvish language skills in the time while I waited for the various participants to arrive. Then, in the time when I didn't have any dwarvish to practice, I worked on the math I had brought along. The participants started arriving a little earlier than last year, but I still had enough time to finish all the math I wanted to do. Unlike last year where the participants all arrived on their own ships, quite a few of the ships that arrived had multiple groups on them.
I asked Shasta how that worked, considering the warlords aren't supposed to meet until the opening banquet, and I was told that the groups who arrived on the same ships were comprised of representative delegates only, with no warlords present. Apparently, part of the reason Goppok Kanaga took so long to verify he was arriving last year was due to difficulties with securing a boat to transport him, since his territory is entirely landlocked. To get around this issue, it seems like more than a few of the landlocked warlords are just sending delegates, and working with their neighbors to share a ship.
Ultimately, a total of 23 participants arrived, and this time, we weren't waiting for anyone. Only nine warlords actually arrived themselves, but since the terms for the auction were already pretty well established, that shouldn't be an issue. It did, however, make the banquet feel a little more awkward due to the ratio of warlords to representatives. Other than that though, it was fairly lively.
What wasn't lively though, was the auction itself. Due to the sheer number of participants, the auction ran for five days before coming to it's conclusion. Though I shouldn't actually complain about it, since we made a lot of money from the whole exchange. Last time, the auction yielded about 32 times our normal trade budget. This time, it was just over 77 times our budget, more than double the last auction. Though, after we factor in Kao's 5%, it's only about 73 times.
That said, the closing banquet was lively, and we got everything sorted out pretty quickly, and within two days, everyone, ourselves included, had left Kao's island. Which means we now have at least 3 dwarven warlords who are contracted to help protect us if we're targeted again in the future for some reason. This year's auction winner is quite close geographically to the previous one. It makes me wonder if seeing the success of the previous crystal in helping an economy made the nearby warlords more willing to pay a larger sum of money for a crystal of their own.
I'll have to spend some time this year thinking about more expensive imports that we might want for our country. I really don't think it's that wise to just sit on money, when it could be doing work for us instead. Perhaps I should consider looking into the idea of hiring skilled laborers? If there are guilds of some kind who deal in different types of labor, we could potentially rent some labor out for a year to do some form of work for us.
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I arrived back on our island on the twenty-second day of the twelfth month of the year. With only a little over a month left until spring, I wanted to start the mining team on their new tunnel immediately. So, after getting things measured out and lined up, I did just that. It took a few days to make sure we had everything as lined up and leveled as we could, but after that, the mining crew got to work cutting the new tunnel.
Due to the precision that I'm having the tunnel dug to, they do work a bit slower than normal, but other than that, they do seem to be managing the requirements for the tunnel quite well. While they slowly cut into the mountain, I worked on building a temporary bathhouse just outside the tunnel entrance, so that come springtime, we'd have a good location to move the seaside crystal.
During the spring, the construction team that is normally cutting stone from the new artificial tide pool can instead cut stone from the tunnel to widen it to it's final size. As long as the smaller guide tunnel is accurate, small deviations in the larger tunnel shouldn't cause any issues.
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As spring arrived, and we transitioned construction locations to the new tunnel, things seemed to work pretty well. The amount of stone being removed from the tunnel was more than enough for construction in the city, and the wider tunnel was being dug at a faster pace than the small tunnel, probably due to having less strict requirements for construction, and having an easier time actually moving the stone with the extra space.
Since that project seems to be working well on it's own, I took a few days to have the information about all the posts around the road copied into the city's archive. As long as we don't have any major landslides or earthquakes, we should be able to use any of those posts as starting points for future calculations if they're needed.
After that, I finally had time to start on my own projects again, starting with the pyrite. We did get another crystal sample from the merchant this year, but that project can wait a little longer, since we currently are sitting on a decently large amount of pyrite which I'd like to turn into quality iron.
The issue with the first iron batch was how brittle it was. I can't say for certain what all issues it had, but one is probably residual sulfur, and another is likely contaminant metals. Though some of the metals, like zinc and lead, probably evaporated due to the high heat necessary to melt iron, so it's probably only a few metals, such as copper, left.
I previously discussed that I could try two things, either try to work with the roasted pyrite directly to make quality iron, or use the already smelted brittle iron, and refine it again. Of the two, I think it'd be easiest to work with the brittle iron, mostly because it already has some of the impurities removed. It might waste some work and materials to do it that way, but it's also the most likely to get good results.
Ultimately, I have three things I'm going to try. I'll do each individually, then attempt to merge certain steps together. First, I'll try adding a lot of extra carbon to the mix, and heat it for a long time, with the hopes that the excess carbon will remove some of the remaining sulfur impurities, in a similar reaction to how it removes oxygen impurities.
The second addition is another round of lime being added in as flux, to hopefully preferentially remove some of the other metal impurities from the iron. The third test involves adding soda ash in, to potentially capture some impurities that the lime wouldn't. I expect that each process will remove some of the impurities, but I'm not sure if they'll interact with each other negatively or not, so I'll have to try them independently first.
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I took fourteen days doing testing, and came up with a reasonable process for refining the iron from the pyrite. The final quality of the product is still somewhat low, but it's at least functional, and should be useful for a lot of different production purposes. The final process modifies the first smelting step for the roasted pyrite, and then goes through a second stage.
When testing out additional carbon, I found that it improved the quality of the iron somewhat, but it had certain properties that we didn't want. However, a second melt of that iron would reduce those properties a bit. So, after testing with that, I found that we could get similar results by adding significantly more carbon into the first stage melt of the roasted pyrite.
Then, the second step involves adding a mixture of lime and soda ash to the iron as it's melted again. The slag that the mixture forms seems to be removing a few different impurities, and improved the quality of the iron further, though it does seem like there are still a few impurities that we're having trouble removing. Ultimately, the most expensive part of the process is actually the soda ash, since our best source of that is the float vines.
However, unlike previously, where we were somewhat limited in where we could harvest them, we now have the salvage boat, so in theory, we can harvest them from around the island much easier than before, if the need arises. The float vines only seem to take a few years to reach maturity, so as long as we're not completely clear cutting them, we can probably harvest quite a few of them annually without much issue.
By my calculations, we'll need about one mature float vine to refine one pound of iron, which means we need many thousands of vines to process our current stockpile of pyrite. Which means it'll probably have to take place over a few years time.