Chapter 114: 115

Chapter 115 - Milling

 

"But it's a shame to build a thresher and not have anything else."

"Oh, you've come up with another good tool, have you, General? What kind of tool is it?"

"You've got a great eagerness, Vargas."

"Of course I do. I've tried the thresher you made, and it's a good one. And now you've come up with something just as good, right? It would be strange if I didn't care about it."

"I see. It's really just an idea. I don't know if I can actually make it or not, so don't get your hopes up too high."

"Ha-ha-ha. That's the general. I'm sure he'll do something crazy like he always does. I'm looking forward to it."

　No, wait a minute.

　Wait a minute... I didn't know people thought that about me.

　I'm pretty shocked........

　Well, that's okay.

　I'll have to think about the next tool after the thresher.

　So, I spread out a piece of paper on the table and started to draw a picture.

***

"Hmmm, I don't know."

"What's the matter, Ars-nii?"

"Kyle? No, I was just trying to design a building. It's more difficult than I expected."

"Oh, so you're building something again. Can I take a look?"

"Yeah, sure. Here's the thing, though. It's called a windmill, and it's a building with big wings."

"...... You're trying to make something weird again. Why are these wings attached to the building? Are you trying to use this windmill to fly, nii-san?"

"No, that's not it. This is a building for milling wheat that has been harvested and threshed. The force of the wind turns the wings, which turn the millstone for milling."

"Wow, I didn't think that was possible. That's amazing."

　As I explained to Kyle what I was going to build this time was a building called a windmill.

　Although I had made a tool called a rotary thresher to increase the processing capacity of the harvested wheat, the wheat could not be eaten after it was threshed.

　The threshed wheat had to be milled before it could be made into bread.

　So, how does the milling process work? Again, it is done by hand.

　You hold a stick like a handle attached to a millstone in your hand and roll it around and around to mill the flour.

　This is a very simple, but hard work.

　Now that the threshing process has become more efficient and can be completed in a shorter period of time, I want to shorten the milling process as well.

　That's how I came up with the idea of using windmills.

　By the way, I'm sure that milling can also be done with water mills.

　There is a river flowing near the castle in the north of the river, so I thought about building a water mill there.

　However, it was a bit far from Barcania.

　If I'm going to go to the trouble, I want something that can mill flour here in Barcania.

　That's why I decided to make a windmill instead of a water mill this time.

　A large wing would be attached to a tall building, and the movement of the wing as it spins in the wind would be transmitted to the millstone using gears, which would be the driving force for turning the millstone.

　The structure itself would be a bit complicated, but Gran and I made the gears for the thresher together.

　I don't think there's anything he can't do.

"So, what's troubling you, Ars-nii?"

You are reading story I Was Reincarnated as a Poor Farmer in a Different World, so I Decided to Make Bricks to Build a Castle at novel35.com

"No, that's what I'm asking all right, Kyle. Whether or not the wings of a windmill turn depends on the direction in which the wind hits it."

"That's right. Well, what does that matter?"

"So, you see, a windmill is a building that needs to be able to flexibly change its orientation in the direction the wind is blowing. I have no idea how to do that."

　I'm pretty sure that's what someone said when I saw them on some TV program.

　The person on TV said that a windmill can change the direction of its wings by following the direction of the wind.

　But I don't remember anything about the structure for that.

　I wonder how it was done.

　There are two types of windmills that I remember.

　One was the type used for wind power generation, with three propeller-like blades attached to the top of a thin pole-like structure.

　The other is the type you see in the Netherlands, which looks like a regular building or a tower with board-like wings.

　I think it is the latter type that has historically been used as a flour mill.

　In other words, the windmill building in Don Quixote1it's a story set in a time like this. here's the link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote must have had a mechanism to change the direction of the wings...

"You don't need such a mechanism, do you?"

"Why not? Did you hear what I said, Kyle? If the wind is blowing in the wrong direction, the blades of the windmill won't turn and you won't be able to mill."

"I don't think that's a problem, it's not like we have to mill all year round. If that's the case, why don't we build four windmills, one facing each direction?"

"Oh... four windmills for each of the four directions?"

"Yes, yes. If one of the windmills works, you can mill flour, and I think that's fine."

　...... You could say that.

I had this obsessive thought in my mind that one mill had to constantly keep moving, and hadn't thought of that... But I guess it's not necessarily that way.

　If it made the milling process faster, it wasn't a failure.

　I don't have to recreate the mechanism of the windmill that I can't remember about, in this world.

　If I want, I could just make a windmill that I am able to make now, give Gran my suggestions for improvement, and leave the rest to him.

　After taking Kyle's advice, I decided to make a simple windmill that didn't need to change the direction of the wind.

　I'll build one windmill for each of the four districts of Barcania, east, west, north, and south.

　As long as there is at least some wind, one of the windmills will be able to work.

　It was a little inefficient, but it would still save a lot of time, considering the fact that the milling had been done by hand before.

　In this way, Barcania was able to thresh and flour mill without any problems, even with the increased harvest from my magic.

CadmarLegend Hello all! I'm baaaaak~~ Btw, I have chosen an editor, but still have to contact them. Just in case you were wondering, we solved the thresher thing. It turns out I'm stupid and the thing actually exists.

Some helpful stuff:

 

(credits to @NeoPanthom for providing this picture. and this link too: https://youtu.be/MxXGS8nxZTo )

now, I will quote another commenter's exact reply. 

"Looks like Neo already answered it, but here's my two cents anyway. Ars felt it was a pain to thresh the wheat by hand, so he made a senbakoki which looks like a comb crossed with a leaf rake, you pull the wheat through the comb part and the grain gets torn off. Now he's thinking that a senbakoki won't be good enough to help everyone with the harvest they are expecting, so he is trying to introduce the more advanced version, the rolling cage type of thresher. It should make things a lot easier for everyone, but I saw this type of thresher backfire in another story." 

                         - @CountryMage

One more helpful reader showed me this link: http://ecoursesonline.iasri.res.in/mod/page/view.php?id=2246 and told me that figure 2 was the one that is most likely the thresher from the story. Credits to @Caunus for this.

Thank you to these above-mentioned readers.

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