I am a Primitive Man
Chapter 129 – Second Senior Brother’s Rake
“Pa, pa, pa.”
After the sound of the wooden sticks cutting through the air, there was the sound of wooden forks beating on the rapeseed, mixed with the crackling of rapeseed pods and rapeseed seeds bursting out.
Mu Tou and several other people vigorously beat the rapeseed.
This is not an easy job. If it were easy, people in later generations wouldn’t use oxen and horses to do this work.
From noon until the sun was halfway down the west, the rapeseed in the drying field was thoroughly beaten.
Under Han Cheng’s guidance, Mu Tou and others picked up the beaten, battered, and empty rapeseed stems with wooden forks and piled them on the edge of the drying field.
One small detail needs special attention when doing this: after using a wooden fork to shake the rapeseed stems, they must be completely shoveled away. This is to shake out the rapeseed seeds trapped in the empty stems.
After picking up the rapeseed stems, a layer of fine rapeseed pods and small, dark brown rapeseed seeds is left on the ground.
Han Cheng stepped on it with bare feet, sliding and tickling.
Mu Tou and others began to use a tool to gather these scattered seeds to the middle of the drying field.
This tool is the commonly seen “Rake” in the future.
The so-called “Rake” is usually made of wood, with a structure similar to the nine-tooth nail rake of Piggy from The Journey to the West.
It consists of a wooden stick about one meter long connected to a rake head at the front.
The difference is that Piggy’s nine-tooth nail rake can exorcise demons and be used to plow the fields in Old Gao’s Mansion. In contrast, this wooden “Rake” can only be used in the field.
Using a wooden fork can only roughly clear away the empty rapeseed stems, and many fragments will still fall.
Because the teeth of the wooden fork are few and sparse, with only three teeth, and there is also an old sparse tooth among them, the distance between each fork tooth is nearly twenty centimeters. It is difficult to clear these fragments.
At this time, it is the turn of the “Rake” to take the stage. It has many teeth that are densely spaced and is a good tool to deal with these fragments.
The construction of the “Rake” is simple, and it is not difficult to make.
Just cut a piece of wood about five centimeters in diameter and half a meter long. Then, use a stone axe to cut out four faces as much as possible. After that, drill a hole about one and a half centimeters in diameter every four to five centimeters on one of the faces. There are about nine holes in total.
Since the Green Sparrow tribe already has a hand drill, and Han Cheng came up with a way to enlarge the holes with fire when researching wooden ladders, drilling these holes is not too difficult for the Green Sparrow tribe. It just takes a little more time.
These holes need to be drilled through.
After completing this step, find some harder, thicker wet branches with a diameter of about two and a half centimeters.
First, put one of the branches into the fire and roast about ten centimeters at one end. After waiting a while, remove it from the fire and bend it while hot. It needs to be bent into a not-too-curved arc. After cooling, release it while holding it. This branch will maintain this posture and not return.
This curved part is cut off, and then repeat the previous steps until nine wooden sticks with similar lengths, lengths, and curves are obtained before stopping.
This wooden stick is the teeth on the “Rake”.
Of course, these teeth cannot be used directly and need further processing.
Make one end finer after peeling off the outer layer of burnt black skin.
This task was difficult to accomplish in the past.
At least, Lame, who frequently dealt with wood, felt that it would take at least two days to polish one end of these nine curved wooden sticks to the specifications mentioned by Divine Child.
However, what Han Cheng did next greatly exceed the expectations of Lame. Han Cheng didn’t use stones or other tools to polish the wooden sticks, as Lame expected. Instead, he put the wooden sticks into the nearby fire, letting the flames burn the end that needed to be polished.
Lame, with a mix of concern and anticipation, watched with unblinking eyes, hoping to witness another miracle and learn something new from the Divine Child.
The temperature of the flames quickly turned the bright white wooden sticks black, and they started burning.
After waiting a while, Han Cheng took them out and quickly polished the burnt parts on the stones.
After being burned by the fire, the hardwood was easily dealt with, and the layer of charcoal left on the outside came off with a bit of polishing.
Watching Divine Child quickly polish the stick, which would have taken a lot of effort, Lame’s eyes lit up.
This method is not complicated, but why didn’t he think of it himself?
Feeling somewhat distressed, Lame joined in this novel polishing process.
After the teeth were polished, they were threaded one by one through the previously drilled holes in the wooden pillar. First, thread the finely polished small head so the large head would get stuck in the hole, making it more secure.
The entire rake head was completed after threading the teeth and smashing them firmly with a stone.
However, because it needed to be mounted on a wooden handle, a flat, round-shaped mortise must be chiseled out in the middle of the nine rake teeth. These days, immersed in making wooden ladders and unable to extricate himself, Lame had already mastered the technique of chiseling mortises to perfection. For him, chiseling a mortise like this was a piece of cake.
The thicker end of the cut wooden handle was polished, inserted into the mortise, wedged firmly with a wooden wedge, and possibly the world’s first rake designed for agricultural production appeared.
Because the manufacture of the rake was quite complicated, and Han Cheng remembered this matter when the rapeseed was about to ripen, the Green Sparrow tribe currently only had one rake.
Fortunately, the Green Sparrow tribe now cultivated a small amount of land, and one rake was enough for the current tasks.
After demonstrating how to use the rake, Han Cheng handed this brand-new farming tool to Qi Qiu (Balloon).
Qi Qiu was not a real balloon; he was a person.
He originally came from the Pig tribe. The reason he got such a name was not because he was particularly fat but because of how quickly he gained weight.
When he first joined the Green Sparrow tribe, he was skinny, without an ounce of flesh. However, his body expanded like an inflated balloon after just a few months. Facing such a situation, Han Cheng gave him this name.
Once, Qi Qiu asked Han Cheng what is a balloon. Han Cheng resisted the impulse to tell him that he was something like a bladder and instead said that it was a good thing.
Qi Qiu was very happy to hear that the great Divine Child said balloons were good things.
Looking at the ecstatic Qi Qiu, Han Cheng’s face suddenly twitched because he suddenly remembered that something not used for blowing, like a tool, was also called a balloon.