Category: One Among the Dead

Day 483:

So melting the iron, once I got a strong enough forge built out of rock, was not really a problem. Takes a lot of wood, throws a lot of probably-caustic fumes, smells horrible, glad it’s not in my cavern, but workable.

The sandy clay not so much. The sand and clay both kind of.. well,  not melted, but the clay made sort of a ceramic and the sand didn’t melt, it just sort of… stuck… to stuff, so my iron rails are more like iron-filled-with-air-bubbles-and-impurities.

I think I’m going to need to build a frame and fill it with either clay or sand to make these rails.

I also think clay will be easier to work with.

Day 482:

I’ve very precisely dug two trenches in the front yard that are exactly the dimensions that I want to use for my rails. (They are also not-coincidentally the size of the planks I’ve been making doors out of. Because I’ve gotten pretty consistent with the door work and this way if something happens to my trenches I can remake them with my plank templates.)

I’m building a forge out there so I don’t have to try to walk from the current forge’s location outside and down a hill carrying molten iron. Also, if I build it closely enough I can just tilt the forge’s bucket and pour, and that would be somewhat  safer. Somewhat. Just a little.

The forge is actually the part taking the longest, since the soil here is sandy clay and thus actually was relatively easy to mould. But the forge I really don’t want to screw up. I don’t want to risk an explosion with the volume and temperatures I’m talking about.

 

Day 481:

Learned the hard way to not work with the red rock near my other stuff. Dropped a hammer on it accidentally, got my arm royally zapped. Not feeling well, hoping I haven’t fried my heart. Think I’m taking the rest of the day off to sleep.

Day 480:

It looks like those sparks can pack quite a punch. Instead of just setting a chunk of iron near the spark, this time I punched a hole in the middle of an ingot so that it could spin like a propeller, and then set it down near the spark.

A single spark on a reasonably small amount of red rock spun that heavy chunk of ingot for a good long time.

So I’m thinking I can use this to power a rail system.

The biggest problem will probably be that the rails where the electricity is running will have to be much more conductive than iron, especially if I want them to do things like go up hill.

On the other hand, even on relatively flat land it looks like a medium amount of red rock should be enough to move a cart a reasonably long distance, even if I build the cart out of iron.

(And let’s face it, an iron cart of reasonably thin walls is going to be more durable and possibly lighter than its counterpart in wood. Less kaboom from the giraffe-corgis.)

Day 479:

So I played around with the red rock and here’s what I discovered:

• When you hit it, it releases a spark from the place you hit it to the far other end.
• If you have a piece of iron at the far other end, it will react to the spark’s arrival similar to a magnet: which is to say, it moves.
• Based on my infinitesimal education on electricity, I think it means when you hit the rock, you create not just a spark but a magnetic field around the spark.
• Magnetic fields will turn things.

Am now experimenting with how big a thing it can turn.