Luo Chong's orders were soon relayed to every region, and construction got underway in full swing on all fronts.
First was the steel mill in Xingang Commandery. Once Luo Chong had left, Big Strength immediately summoned a construction team and began building a new blast furnace at the steel mill, specially for smelting Stainless Steel.
From then on, Stainless Steel became a long-term project for the Xingang Commandery steel mill. After all, according to Luo Chong, Food Industry would be developed on a massive scale in the future, which meant a great deal more Stainless Steel would be needed. Weapons manufacturing would need it too, not to mention everyday necessities. What pot, bowl, or pan could do without Stainless Steel?
Although it was a newly built blast furnace, it was still constructed inside the original workshop. The new Stainless Steel smelting furnace was four times larger than the original blast furnace. It was the Han Tribe's first blast furnace with a steel shell: steel plates were riveted together on the outside, angle steel formed the supporting framework inside, and refractory bricks were then laid along the interior.
The advantage of this design was that it allowed the furnace to be made larger, giving it greater capacity and producing more Molten Iron in a single run.
In the past, the Han Tribe absolutely could not have built such a large furnace. It was not only because the necessary hard conditions were absent—for example, they could not process steel plates that large, drill holes, or rivet them together. Those were all hard requirements. Put simply, their manufacturing technology was insufficient, and they simply could not build it.
The Han Tribe had also been unable to meet the soft requirements back then.
Once a blast furnace began operating, it normally ran twenty-four hours