It was already the end of February 1790 when Zhang Bingwen came out of Beihai Town Central Hospital after a hundred days of broken bones.
Although this hospitalization caused Zhang Bingwen's family to miss the opportunity to be assigned to work as farmers in Boli Town, because he had worked in a blacksmith shop for two years in his hometown, he was assigned to the ironmaking workshop of the Beihai Town Steel Plant after being discharged from the hospital. , as a sampler.
Sampling workers, like thermometer workers, are the two basic types of work in iron and steelmaking workshops. They are actually just odd jobs. This is the most unskilled and physically tiring of all types of work, and it also has the lowest wages. In addition to running errands to send samples for quality inspection, I also have to do other chores.
In fact, in front of the furnace, everyone has to start from the most basic temperature measurement and sampling; those who do well will be promoted until they reach the position of furnace director. No one can take key positions as soon as they come up.
However, for Zhang Bingwen, this is tantamount to joy falling from heaven. The salary of the sampler is 10 Beihai dollars per month, which is equivalent to two taels of silver, and can buy 200 kilograms of white flour at Beihai Trading Company.
Two hundred kilograms of white flour can feed a family of three and they will definitely be rich. Moreover, the steel factory also provides two meals a day, which are large in quantity and sufficient in oil and water. They also provide work clothes. But Zhang Bingwen's family has four members, and the fifth is about to welcome them.
Fortunately, Zhang Bingwen's children both went to Beihai Town's primary school to read and study, and the school provided lunch every day; his wife, Zhang Huang, also got a job collecting shoe soles from the residents' mutual aid group. Each pair of shoe soles costs 2 cents to make. Zhang Huang can earn 2 Beihai dollars a month by making a pair in three days.
In fact, this is a temporary rescue job. When Zhang Huang can work in the fields after giving birth, she may be assigned to work in a shoe factory. At present, hand-operated electric thick-thread sewing machines are used in the shoe-making factory in Beihai Town. The production speed of soles is many times faster than that of hand sewing.
Even so, Zhang Huang calculated her income of 12 silver dollars and felt that she was already living a life like heaven.
Her husband didn't spend a penny for hospitalization, and the doctor at the hospital also examined Zhang Huang and told her that the fetal position was straight and everything was fine.
The house was issued by the Civil Affairs Bureau, and you can live there for free. Although the area is not large compared to other old immigrant families in Beihai Town, with only two east and west rooms and a small entrance hall, for Zhang Huang, it is already dozens of times better than the adobe house in her hometown.
The blue cotton-padded jacket she was wearing was also issued to her by the immigration department. Not only she, but also the whole family had one set, including shoes.
In fact, the immigration department in Beihai Town is quite helpless. The people here are all refugees, and their clothes are in rags, which is okay in summer, but in winter it is dozens of degrees below zero, and if you don’t wear clothes, you will freeze to death.
Furthermore, unlike other resettlement sites, there have long been no cellars here in Beihai Town, so anyone who has the skills to stay here will be treated better than other refugees.
The only thing that made her feel a little regretful was that Beihai Trading Company only sold white flour and rice, and the sorghum rice she used to eat was not available at all. Although white flour is delicious and cheap, ordinary landlord families in Guanhai don’t dare to eat it like this!
The couple was so excited that they didn't close their eyes for half the night, lying on the bed chattering about the beautiful life in the future.
"Dad, do your arms and legs still hurt?"
"It doesn't hurt anymore. I think I can earn two taels of silver a month, and nothing hurts anymore."
"Dad, this life is really like a dream."
"No, if I had known that I would have such a day, I wouldn't have gone to Chibaoju."
"Then do you regret it?"
"I won't regret it if I can make sure you three have enough to eat."
"You have such a stubborn temper, like a bull. You have to hit the south wall, and you always get a bloody head. If you hadn't offended the county guards, you wouldn't have lost your job in the iron factory."
"I just can't stand how domineering they are! My father was right. He said, what the hell, it's not a disaster to lose a horse."
"Is it a horse, not a commodity? What kind of commodity is it not?"
"Just saying that losing a horse is not necessarily a disaster. Maybe there will be good things later."
"What my father-in-law said is quite reasonable. It's a pity that his old man and mother were gone when I came through the door, and he didn't drink the tea I offered him."
"My father used to say that he traveled all over the world just to serve a bowl!" Zhang Bingwen suddenly felt a sore nose and tears began to well up in his eyes.
The woman hurriedly came over to coax her a few words, then changed the subject, talking about getting paid tomorrow to pull pieces of cloth to make clothes for her daughter Yaya and her son Huzi, and she also had to prepare clothes for the child who was about to be born... ..
Zhang Bingwen's father actually said that a blessing in disguise may lead to disaster later.
Sure enough, the next morning, Zhang Bingwen took the note from the Immigration Department to the Public Security Police Station to apply for a work permit, and a photo incident ensued.
To apply for a work permit, you must take a photo. After seeing the three-inch photo of himself, Zhang Bingwen was so frightened that he cried out and begged the security policeman who took the photo to return his soul to him.
The security police have seen too many ridiculous things like this, even when they first came to Beihai Town. However, he used another set of words for Zhang Bingwen.
"Remember! You are not allowed to leave your badge when working!"
"Yes. Master, what about when I go home and sleep?"
"Keep it close by. Note, if you lose it, you will be fined ten yuan."
When Zhang Bingwen heard this, he thought to himself, "Oh my God, we only earn ten silver dollars a month, but this one card is worth two taels of silver. There is really no reason to explain." Then he asked unwillingly: "Master, what should I do if it gets dirty?"
"This is sealed. No water or dirt can seep in. Do you understand?"
"Yes. I understand."
It is said that people who work on the east bank of the Xila River must first go to the Public Security Police Station to get a work badge and enter their fingerprints, otherwise they will not even be able to enter the factory gate. If they are here to spy on secrets, even if they sneak into the factory in Beihai Town, it will be difficult to escape.
The security police had captured two guys before, and the two men seemed frightened that they could be caught so quickly. They couldn't figure out how they were discovered.
In fact, this trick is very simple. There is a communication chip inside the shell of each work card. As long as people move abnormally, multiple base stations deployed on the east coast can track them through triangulation.
When the communication chip is connected to the base station signal, the monitoring personnel can determine the location of the person based on the signal strength of the person and the three surrounding base stations. This calculation method is called "trigonometric calculation".
Although this method has errors, a distance of several meters is still acceptable. Through this move, Beihai Town effectively prevented all parties from spying. Those spies never imagined that as long as they entered the east bank of the Xila River, they would already be under the surveillance of Beihai Town's "Sky Eye".
By the way, one of the two people who spied on the secrets of the factory was a spy sent by the shogunate, and the other was from the Manchu.
Currently, the only one who can enter and leave the training base without taking pictures is Wu Zhong. This was a special case. Wang Yuanfang rushed to ask for help, but he still asked the other party not to lose his identity tag.
After Zhang Bingwen reported to the iron factory, because his newly healed arm was still not feeling well, the furnace director temporarily asked him to be responsible for sending samples back and forth.
This morning, as soon as he returned from delivering things to the quality inspection department, he saw seven or eight people in uniforms coming into the factory, surrounded by a tall young man. He stood at the door of the workshop for a while, and then walked around to Went behind.
What surprised Zhang Bingwen was that everyone in the workshop bowed to the man's back from a distance whenever they had nothing to do. So he asked one person: "Who is that? Why are you bowing to him?"
"You actually don't know who he is?!" The worker shook his head in confusion when he saw Zhang Bingwen, so he explained: "That's Prince Zhao! You are wearing the clothes given by him and living in the house given by him. Don’t you know his old man?”
When Zhang Bingwen heard this, he quickly ran to the door, bowed in the direction of the backyard, and then said a little embarrassedly: "I, I have been in the hospital before. I have never seen him before."
Zhao Xin didn't know that he had become an "old man". He came here today to see Zhao Liang.
Beginning in March this year, Beihai Town will begin to imitate later Springfield Model 1863 rifles.
This front-loading smoothbore flash cap gun provided to the servant army is named "Model 1790 Rifle". It uses paper tubes to load ammunition, the flash cap is fired, and the rate of fire can reach 2 to 4 rounds per minute. The muzzle velocity is 300 meters per second to 430 meters per second, the effective range is 180 to 370 meters, and the maximum range is 730 to 910 meters.
The new muzzle-loading rifle is not sold to the outside world and is only equipped to the island nations and Ainu servants in the Northern Navy sequence. By the way, since you want people to help you fight the war, especially against Tsarist Russia, you can't always use revolvers. You have to equip yourself with rifles anyway.
Before starting production, Zhao Liang, the boss in charge of the "military-industrial complex", decided to hold a two-person meeting, mainly to discuss with Zhao Xin what kind of steel materials and specifications to use in order to determine the manufacturing cost and external sales price.
However, Zhao Liang did not talk about guns at first, but about the upcoming group of new people, namely professionals in steel and steel rolling.
At present, the development of heavy industry in Beihai Town has reached a bottleneck point. Zhao Liang's level of steel refining and metal machining alone is far from meeting the requirements of heavy industry development.
For example, large gears for locomotive traction, supercharger transmission gears, rear axles, extremely loaded connecting rods and spring clips, bending machine molds, oil deep well drill pipe joints and seamless steel pipes, etc., all need to be used. AISI4140 alloy steel.
The development of this kind of extremely high-strength alloy steel is also very difficult, mainly because the quality of the billet, the dimensional accuracy of the rolled material and the heat treatment process are very high, which is simply not what Zhao Liang can do.
Another example is high manganese steel, which can only be produced in small batches now, and the North Navy will need more cannons that can shoot farther in the future.
There is also the silicon steel used to make the motor rotor core, and the No. 45 steel currently needed to imitate the M1863 rifle.
So this year, Zhao Xin took advantage of the Spring Festival to send people home and asked his cousin's company to start recruiting professionals in steel and steel rolling all over the country. Following Wu An'an's lesson, Zhao Xin only wanted people over fifty years old this time, and the number should be at least one hundred.
The main tasks of these people after coming here are to formulate the steel composition, process route, and organize the production of process parameters during the production process. This is definitely something that only professionals can do. Furthermore, it is necessary to bring out a large number of apprentices.
The location of the new steel plant currently selected by Zhao Xin is in Khabarovsk Town, which is on the west bank of the Hun Tong River. Starting from mid-March, the construction team under the Civil Affairs Bureau will enter the site and start leveling the land in the planned area.
After chatting about recruiting, Zhao Liang got down to the topic: "For the barrel of the 1790 rifle, I plan to use a No. 45 seamless steel pipe with an outer diameter of 22, an inner diameter of 16, and a wall thickness of 3 mm. To be honest, it is expensive. Yes, but the material performance is definitely fine.”
Zhao Xin nodded, found a piece of paper and wrote down the data on it, and asked casually: "Does that mean the caliber is 16 mm? I said, brown basses have 19 mm, and the French also use 17 mm. Is ours too small? Already?"
"It's not small. M1863 is only 14.732 mm. Besides, the performance of our black powder is much better than what the Europeans are using now."
"Okay, you continue."
"The dimensions of other parts of the gun body remain the same as the M1863, and the barrel length is 1,400 mm."
Zhao Xin asked while writing down: "How much does it weigh?"
"A lot lighter than the original gun." Zhao Liang rattled off the specifications of the imitation weapon: "The weight of the seamless steel pipe per meter is 1.40562 kilograms, 1400 mm is 1.968 kilograms, plus the locking bolt 0.08 kilograms and the bolt combination 0.3 kilograms and a wooden stock of 1.5 kilograms, the total weight is 3.847 kilograms, and the original gun is 4.1 kilograms."
"Well, it's not bad. I mainly consider whether the small bodies of the islanders can carry it. Otherwise, if it is built and cannot be carried, it will be ruined."
"By the way, I went back and asked about the seamless steel pipe we need this time. The length is five meters, and the market price per ton is around 62,000, excluding shipping costs."
So Zhao Xin calculated based on these data. If one barrel is 5 meters long, each barrel can be used to make three barrels. Five thousand barrels is 35.14 tons, which is about 2.18 million.
If you don't consider shipping costs and only include processing and other materials, the average cost of each rifle is less than 200 yuan, which is less than the price of a gram of gold.
As long as the planned "Cossack Kingdom" can gain a foothold in the West Siberian Plain west of the Yenisey River, then both the Lena River and the gold mines north of Irkutsk will be in its pocket. And once the Tsarist Empire was cut off from its eastward route, wouldn't it be easy to take Alaska as its own... Hey, there are so many unclaimed lands these days.
Thinking of this, Zhao Xin suddenly felt much happier. He stood up and said, "I'll leave if it's okay?"
"Of course not." Zhao Liang threw aside the materials in his hand and continued: "The inventory of SKS barrels is not enough. The early batches of ammunition we made did not have good primer technology and were too corrosive to the barrels. You have to buy at least 20,000 more guns, and the barrels of the first batch of guns have to be replaced."
Zhao Xin nodded and said, "Okay, I understand."
The so-called barrel life refers to the number of bullets that can be fired by the barrel while maintaining accuracy. Taking the SKS as an example, if shooting accuracy is not considered and there is no high-density continuous shooting, you can fire 20,000 or 50,000 rounds at will.
Because the rifle in the barrel will cause the caliber to be slightly reduced, the diameter of the bullet is slightly larger than the diameter of the barrel plus the rifle. When shooting, the warhead is squeezed into the barrel by the gunpowder gas under the pressure of the gunpowder explosion, hits the rifle line, and is then forced to rotate. The warhead will wear out the rifle line to a certain extent. When the rifle line is worn to a certain extent, the diameter of the barrel becomes larger and the accuracy naturally decreases.
In addition, the friction between the gunpowder gas and the warhead and the rifle will cause the entire barrel to heat up, the metal will expand when heated, and the diameter of the barrel will naturally increase, resulting in a decrease in accuracy.
Theoretically, as long as a standard-diameter bullet cannot be inserted into the mouth of the barrel, the barrel can still be used. For barrels that pursue precision, such as the HK416, the requirements are much higher. Generally, when the average moa number exceeds 50% to 150% of the optimal moa value, the barrel should be replaced with a new one.
In fact, the life of the barrel depends on many factors, such as the shooting frequency. When the barrel is hot, do we have to wait until it cools down before firing? Has the new gun been broken in? Is maintenance performed in a timely manner? Were acid-primed corrosive bullets used? Are there any corrosive substances in the explosive ingredients? You must know that the destructive effect of acid corrosion gunpowder on the barrel is equivalent to no chrome plating.
Another key point is the rifling grinding tools. In another time and space, the arsenal usually replaces one set of grinding tools for every thousand barrels produced. For example, A's gun barrel is the first to be produced, and B's is the 900th, so B's barrel life must be shorter than A's.
In industry, especially military industry, nothing should be careless. Basic industries cannot be promoted, materials and technology are not up to standard, and there are many troubles.
()
1 second to remember the vertex:.
