Once the tasks had been assigned, everyone quickly got busy. As usual, Jiao Ce took the interns to assemble the machines. Fortunately, something like a mixer was not difficult to put together. The mixing drums were already made; they only needed to install the bases and Steam Engines, then mount the drums.
The drum was linked to the gears on the base through a ring of gears around its outer casing, then connected to the Steam Engine through another set of gears. It could rotate in both directions: forward for mixing and backward for discharging from the rear. It was basically no different from a modern small electric mixer, except that this one was somewhat larger and could mix more concrete at a time.
However, large structures like bridge piers required an astonishing amount of concrete, so they had placed six mixers here to ensure that more concrete could be produced at the same time.
As for the other preparations, the logistics team had run into a slight problem with fresh water. They had chosen a somewhat elevated location for mixing the concrete. Digging a reservoir there would be easy enough, but the residential area where they had dug wells to draw water was slightly lower. Even if they dug a Water Channel, the water would not be able to flow over.
To solve this problem, they had no choice but to ask the Carpentry Group for help. They directly used bamboo to make supports and wooden planks to make water troughs, constructing an overhead bridge running straight from the residential area to the concrete-mixing area.
They would first use the Steam Water Pump to raise the water to a six-meter-high water tower. The water in the tower would then flow through the trough suspended in midair into the reservoir