The preparations had been fairly thorough, so the concrete-pouring work went smoothly as well. However, since the Han Tribe currently had no specialized construction equipment, such as concrete mixers or pump trucks, they could only replace them with large amounts of manual labor. As a result, their progress and efficiency were rather slow.
Fortunately, pouring concrete was not an especially advanced technique. Moreover, they were only pouring the foundations this time, so they encountered no difficulties.
Bag after bag of cement, together with river sand and gravel, was fed into the mixer. Once turned into slurry, it was poured into the prefabricated wells. As they poured, they assembled the reinforcing cages upward. In just one day, they had filled both pier foundation wells completely. Several rings of reinforcement arranged in circles protruded from the level concrete surface; these were the joints left for continuing the piers upward.
Looking at the two completed pier foundation wells, Zhu Ping asked excitedly,
"Master Jiao, how long will it take before we can continue pouring the piers upward?"
"This... this? It might take a month. Otherwise, getting it to solidify completely from the inside out would probably be difficult. After all, it's such a huge thing!" Jiao Ce thought about what Chieftain Han had told him before he left, then answered.
"What? A whole month before it dries completely? That's... that's far too slow! If we can't continue pouring, won't we have nothing to do during this time?" Zhu Ping asked in surprise.
"Not necessarily. Since we can't pour the upper parts of the piers yet, we can focus on pouring the foundation wells for now. Aren't there still more than a dozen foundation wells that have already been dug? We can pour the foundations for those piers first.
"Once they have all dried,