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[Foxite]

Hai,
I was just setting up a textile industry from the article on the wiki when I read that I need a millstone to make dye. So I thought, "OK, then Ill make one". However there doesnt appear to be any tutorial on the wiki that explains how to make a millstone, or more specifically, a working, powered one. I know that you need to place down a windmill, a millstone, and axles and gear assemblies in between them to do it, but in what order? And what is the most efficient/easiest for starting out?
So can anybody link me a tutorial or explain here how to make a working millstone?
PS: I just came up with an interesting efficiency idea: is it possible to make a tower that doubles as an archery tower and a windmill tower?

[PaleBlueHammer]

Dwarven power is a fairly complex project (for new players).  The short answer is: any power-generating engine can power your millstone, and that will be either a windmill or a water wheel:  http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2012:Water_wheel

The even shorter answer is: you can build a couple of querns and place them in the meantime, and those don't need to be powered in order to grind plants into dye.  I don't know how much more efficient a powered millstone is than, say, a set of four querns, but I do know that unless I have some OTHER need for power in my fort, I rarely bother with mills and wheels and routing axles and gears all over my fort.

[Garath]

one millstone can do the work of 4 querns with much less manpower.

I don't know how to explain it properly, but the most basic setup would be starting with a millstone at the bottom, build a vertical axle on top and then the windmill above it. A little more complex would be to make a gearbox with a vertical axle and the windmill and connect one or more millstones through horizontal axles.
You need to start the construction from the bottom up usually, as all the parts need to rest on something that supports them. You also need to make sure there are holes in the ceilings so axles can pass through instead of standing on the floor.
You can also connect levers to gearboxes to turn things off. However, an 'off' gearbox won't support axles or anything above it, so keep that in mind when using them, and do use them: Always make sure that, whatever fantastic thing you made that can not possibly go wrong, you can turn it off when something does go wrong, or you want to expand it, or a goblin got lost among the machinery and you need to have it killed. This goes doubly so if you're also using water or magma in the contraption.

Windmills have some issues though. The center tile needs to be open to the sky or it stops working, which basically means you got a hole in your defences against any flying building destroyers like Titans. You also can't stack them and making a windmill park is a lot of effort for little gain. At some point you'll be losing too much energy in axles and gears. Which concerns another issue. A windmill produces 0, 20 or 40 power depending on your location, which isn't much, almost nothing or really nothing and you don't know what it'll be untill you try.

Waterwheels are more efficient. First of all, it produces a steady dependable 100 energy. It can be constructed completely indoors with only some planning required and only needs horizontal support, so gear-axle-wheel combinations can easily be switched off without the whole thing collapsing.

A waterwheel only needs moving water, it doesn't matter which way it is moving or if it is actually in a technical sense moving or just sloshing around.water of 4/7, 4/7 and 5/7 with have the 5 moving around continuously, which is enough to produce power.

You need to plan where it goes, because the water will be on the z-level below, you need to make a sort of cistern there.

[jcochran]

And you can get sneaky with the definition of "moving water" with water wheels. I frequently have a 3 tile long pool of 7/7 water underneath a water wheel to power a few millstones in my forts.... Mind, the creation of that isolated pool takes a bit of effort (initially, create a tunnel to the edge of the map, smooth and engrave a fortification at the map edge, install a floodgate at each end of the intended pool, fill the tunnel with water until it flows off the map edge, close floodgates, etc. But once I have the "moving water" isolated into the pool I want, I can dig out and destroy all the infrastructure I used in creating that pool.

[fractalman]

Kinda what others said: use querns at first.  dwarfs who spend a lot of time at a quern will eventually get almost as fast as a powered-mill....I think.

If you have the dwarflabor to spare on actually dyeing stuff, you probably have the dwarflabor to spare for querns.