NOVEL SIMPLE [Vol.4] Ch.15 Windmill Part 1
Now that I'm back in town, I've checked over the new crops we're growing. While there are a few minor problems, it seems like the goblins are doing a good job of managing the fields. The first rotation of Reka are almost ready to harvest, which I hope will improve Karsh's family's mood.
Karsh himself seems pretty happy making high-quality metal ingots. In another week or two, he'll probably be done processing all the ore, and I want to get him working on the next project I have planned as soon as possible. Which means I need to clear an area behind the salt evaporation ponds near the ocean. There, I plan to build the first windmill on the island. It'll be a large construction, and I'll need a lot of help from the carpenter to complete the building.
The intent is to build it similar to old English windmills, which had the most automation before steam power became commonplace. The roof and main fan will rotate to face the wind, powered by a smaller fan that rotates the whole apparatus slowly until the small fan's blades are parallel to wind flow. At that point, the main fan will be properly aligned. Then, by using spring tension, the fan blades themselves will be automatically adjusted to keep the fan rotating at a constant speed.
The automatic fan adjustment will be the hardest to get right, and we'll probably have to tinker a lot with the size and thickness of the spring. Thankfully, once we get it right once, any duplicate windmills can use identical springs. Since we're right along the ocean, we should be able to take good advantage of the wind blowing in for mechanical power.
We'll need that for processing the Korogo seeds to make flour in a sizeable volume. Considering they seem to have alcohol, there must be some kind of rising agent like yeast available. That means that we could make bread at some point in the future. Even without yeast though, there are many different cooking uses for flour, so I'm looking forward to getting our first windmill set up. We have plenty of other uses for mechanical power after that however, so I think we'll probably end up building many of these buildings.
I spent twelve days clearing the plot where I want to build the windmill. There were quite a few trees in the way that I cut down, and I ended up using thermal hands to speed up the process of felling them so that I could start prepping the land. Karsh finished refining all the ore yesterday with the help of a few goblins running the rock crushers, so for now he has free reign to make what he wants with the ingots.
I've flattened the land here, but I need to attach this building to the bedrock a foot below the surface, so I'm going to have to remove dirt here first. Then, the central area of the windmill is going to be a ten foot radius circle, which slowly tapers up to the roof section. Then the roof itself will be made primarily from wood, with a thin lightstone cap to make it more water resistant while keeping the weight down.
For once the lighter properties of the wood here are going to come in handy, since it means less mass on both the roof and fan blades for turning. For now, we won't waterproof the fan blades, since we don't have a good waterproofing agent for the rotating blades. Considering the ships that arrive are made from wood means I should be able to trade for a waterproofing agent next year. For now, we'll just plan on replacing the blades when that time arrives.
Getting the shell of the windmill built took twenty-two days. I had to build the internal stairwell as I went, since the whole thing is just over fifty feet tall. I ended up commissioning a few goblins to help haul the stone I needed for construction, and I ended up using much more than I thought I would.
The reason it used so much stone was that I initially had thought I would just taper the whole thing down, but I realized as I built that the base had to be built much thicker, so the inside of the mill is basically a cylinder, and the outside is more of a conical shape. This makes it extra sturdy, which should we get another bad storm, at least the base should stay intact even if debris hits the building.
The fishergoblins really started to take note of the construction once it was built to over twenty feet, and I could see them looking up from the tide pools occasionally to watch me shape more and more stone onto the building. From on top of the building, I can tell I have a new problem I need to solve before we attempt to affix anything on the windmill. I didn't clear enough trees from nearby. The blades for a mill this large are going to reach too far, and have the potential at certain orientations to hit a tree, which means I'm going to have to spend some time cutting more down.
At this point though, I have some work for Karsh to do. I need bearings made for the mill. Some large bearings for handling the roof's rotation, and some smaller ones for handling the various turbines and shafts within the mill. Which means I'll also need grease. Thankfully, with the amount of fish that is eaten here, if we actually start collecting the fat from cooking, and render it properly, we'll have a ready supply of lubricant if we cook it with lime made from sea shells.
Speaking of sea shells, since they were in such high demand again and will be for the foreseeable future, the goblin who collected seashells has hired some other goblins to help them with the work. They've even started paying to go down into the tidal pools every few days to collect shells that slowly deposit in there. They've recently put in a request to use warehouse space to store more shells they collect, which I intend to let them use at a steep discount considering how useful those shells have been. Once Karsh is done helping me with the windmill, I'll probably have him make a rock crusher for them to use for pulverizing shells. Not only will they take less space that way, but considering we want them pulverized for lime already, it'll save us the hassle.
I worked with Karsh for a week to get the smaller bearings designed and a few made. In that time, I also worked with the carpenter goblin to start on the roof for the windmill. It'll be a dome shape, but first I want a ring of wood made, with a skirt on either side to help with rain. After Karsh finishes all the small bearings, I'm going to work with him to try to get a bearing loop made to sit under the wood ring, so that the whole roof's weight is distributed on large bearings.
The wood ring and skirt should help keep those bearings dry. Eventually, the inside skirt will be removed, so that the bearings can be accessed from the inside, with a few removable portions for maintenance. Once those bearings are installed, we'll begin the construction of the dome proper, along with various internal metal portions for transmission of mechanical energy. In an ideal world we'd have specific metals for both the bearings and springs for this whole process, but we can only use what we have on hand...
I've also gone to check on how the rock dam construction is coming along. They've managed to build 30 of them, with plenty of available space to keep building them. The water in some of the second-order tributaries has stopped flowing, likely due to the decrease in overall rainfall as we slowly change seasons. That doesn't mean that we don't need rock dams there though, and I took a little time to show the goblins how to follow where the water flows even when there isn't any currently there.
After a solid month of work, we've made some good progress on the windmill. The daily light rains have let up in the last few weeks, meaning the rainy spring season is probably over. We've gotten the roof made on the windmill, and I've put a thin lightstone cap over the whole thing. Building the cap ended up being way more of a pain than I initially thought due to the height all this was built at. For both the carpenter and myself I attached a stone platform around the outside of the windmill, so we can walk around the outside of the dome. That was also built from lightstone, and has diagonal support struts attached back into the windmill for stability.
With a bit of effort, I can rotate the dome, which is a good sign for the future of the whole project. The next few parts of the construction are going to be tricky. First, I want to build the auxiliary fan which will rotate the whole roof. For that, I'm going to have Karsh make some gears so we can get a high gear ratio from that fan. Next, I'll have gear teeth made around the perimeter of the mill on the inside near the top, and a drive gear which will be used to actually rotate the roof when that fan turns.