The foundry

[Keymonus]

Spoiler

Previously...

Minerary Office

Money among the stones

Rimbaud Canal

Astrapi Silver Mine

Astrapi, August 618, halfway between the city and the mine

"Good morning monsieur Duchamp, I am honored by your presence here. As you can see, the foundry is now fully operative, and we estimate the costs will be completely refunded in a couple of months". 

"The honor is mine, director, you've done an admirable work!" Replied Renè  Duchamp. Director's prediction was a bit too optimistic, but how to blame his enthusiasm? They had been just a step before complete failure, the investors were discouraged and only his own reassurance to creditors, Tristan's perseverance and the director's skills saved House Rimbaud's investment on Astrapi silver. 
Everything about that damned silver has resulted harder than expected, with the ore in an impervious area, water infiltrations in the tunnels, the employment of an half of the labour force in the construction of the Arsenal and, last but not least, copper in the silver veins, just enough to make conventional smelting process almost useless.

"As you can see, we are receiving in this very moment some partially refined silver from the mine... it is smelted there, but that doesn't remove copper. The cargos are delivered to the pier using small boats or bigger barges"

"What are those men doing?"  Asked Duchamp, curious.

"They are numbering and date-stamping the barrels. Since their content comes from the same area of the mine, we will assay only some of them for copper amount, and mixing them up wouldbe a problem"

"And here you can see the beast -continued the director- the heart of the foundry. This is our cupellation furnace, eating coal and pooping fine silver... I am sorry sir, forgive my rudeness."

"No problem, Director, it is no trouble at all. Please, go on: how does your famous furnace work?"

"How I was saying, sir, it is a cupellation furnace, not a great innovation, but the first one in the New Worl; as the name suggests, it contains one or more "cups", bowls of calcareus sand. The smelted silver from the mine is loaded in the furnace together with a calculated amount of lead. When the metal melts, we open the hatch, and the strong air flow oxidise lead to litharge, that sinks through silver and is absorbed by the sand, dragging copper away. Copper oxidises too, but without the lead movement it would remain mixed with silver."

"Lead... that's why you need so much lead! It's not easy bring it to the foundry!"

"I know, monsieur, and for this reason we have a good stock of both lead and coal. My men are bringing lead ingots inside the warehouse, a hard job, I do not envy them at all"

"There we also store the barrels of raw silver, ready for refination"

"Please, monsieur, come with me in the building behind us. As you can see there are a little furnace, used to assay raw silver, and what's needed to verify weight and size of silver ingots and to mark them."

"Good morning guys. Thank you for the tour, Director. I only have a question: what is that yellow powderon the table?"

"An easy question, monsieur. It is solid litharge, that is lead oxide. We usually sell some of it to local painters, who use it as yellow pigment."

The facade of the building

An overall view

 

[Fraunces]

awesome build, full of details. I like the furnaces, buildings and the minifg selection! It looks very realistic, well done!

[LM71Blackbird]

Splendid build! The terrain is awesome, the building realistic, and the story interesting.

[Bart]

Excellent built showing all the steps and the tricks done to smelt the ores.

[Bodi]

Nice photos, great build and great minifigs, the amount of details is astonishing! There is a lot to like.

Good to see Astrapi expanding again.

[Roadmonkeytj]

I really like the workshop in this one ... And I may have to borrow your roof treatment in orange lol give a use for all those minifig bases lol

[Keymonus]

Thank you all! As usual I spent a lot of time in minifig posing, but this time I focused a little more on terrain and architecture.

@Roadmonkeytj Thank you for your comment! To be honest I myself borrowed the roof of the white building from somewhere, even if I can not remember where! 

[Flavius Gratian]

A great build! As said the level of detail is very impressive, especially for the ground; all those plates must have taken ages.  I'm always amazed by the diffferent parts of the process in factory builds and yours is no exception! I also like the discinct differences in style between the office and the warehouse!

My only criticism would be that the round 1x1s used as the stone base for the office blends in with the street, which looks a bit strange.

[blackdeathgr]

Really well built with an interesting writing (as usual). Your photography level is great too. If I had to change something, it would be the top of the furnace with it's studded surface as opposed to the tiled surfaces (roofing) of the other buildings.

[Ross Fisher]

This is fantastic. I love how educational some of these builds are! I learn so much. Thinking of building Astrapi a mint at some point. Then it'll have the whole process. 

[RocketSeason]

Very nice build!  I really enjoy the ground work.

[Professor Thaum]

Cool built, I like the technic for both roofs and this shingle beach is really well rendered !

 

Good job on the two ovens

[Keymonus]

Thank you all for the feedback! Probably this is my last build about silver, but I like the idea of the mint.

I agree about the roof of the furnace, it looks a little unfinished, but the tiled version looked worse and was less stable.

I will also keep in mind the road/wall transition, in the physical version looks well, but in photos, from certain angles, it fades completely!