According to Li Zhiyun's plan, the arsenal is divided into two parts: the factory department and the production department. The factory department consists of the design department, production department, materials department, general affairs department, etc., and the production department includes the machine repair workshop, casting and forging workshop, firearms workshop, ammunition workshop, and grenade workshop. wait.
When Li Zhiyun left Chang'an last time, 90% of the construction of the arsenal was completed. By the time he came back from Jinyang, not only had the building construction been completed, but the equipment had been installed and formal production had begun.
The arsenal is divided into three parts: office area, production area and family area. Currently, only a two-story office building has been built in the office area. In addition to the boiler room, five factory buildings and three warehouses have been built in the production area. Although the factory buildings are all brick and wood structures, they are spacious and tall. Each factory building is seventy-five feet long, ten feet wide, and one foot and five feet high. It has doors and windows on all four walls and has good ventilation and lighting. In order to save land, dozens of three-story wooden buildings were built in the family area, each of which can accommodate six families.
On the first day after Li Zhiyun returned from Jinyang, he went to visit and inspect the arsenal. Of course, the first place he went to was the production workshop. Accompanied by a group of entourage, he first looked at the boiler room. The boiler room is a square building, eight feet long and eight feet wide, with a boiler installed in it. Since the arsenal required a large amount of steam, the boiler was also very large. Li Zhiyun estimated that it was similar to the four-ton boilers of later generations. This boiler was made by craftsmen based on the drawings he drew. It was very crude and simple. Its complexity and precision were not comparable to those of later boilers, but its principles and functions were similar.
The most important thing about a boiler is to ensure safety. Since there is no pressure gauge, it is impossible to know whether the steam pressure in the container is too high, thereby avoiding a boiler explosion. The craftsmen were very smart and installed a thin iron pipe to judge the pressure inside the container based on the force and sound of the steam ejected, which is somewhat similar to the pressure cooker of later generations.
The steam generated by the boiler passes through pipes to the steam turbine in the adjacent factory building, drives the turbine to rotate, and then transmits the power to an iron rod five to six feet long. A wheel is installed on the iron rod every two or three feet, and various machine tools are installed on both sides. The power on the wheel is transmitted to the machine tool through a belt transmission device, thereby driving the machine tool to operate.
Since there is no rubber, the belt is made of burlap, which is not very wear-resistant, so the wear rate is very high. As for the machine tools, they are all homemade by craftsmen, including lathes, drilling machines and milling machines. They are very crude and most of the parts are made of wood and are barely usable. Among them, the lathe is the most important, as it depends on drilling the barrel and rifling.
The biggest disadvantage of relying on steam for power is that once the turbine rotates and outputs power, all machine tools must run accordingly. They cannot start or stop when they want. Li Zhiyun has already sent people to search for magnetite. Once the magnet is found, the copper material will be drawn into wire. With the magnet and copper wire, he can make a generator and use firepower to generate power. With electricity, the next step is to electrify the arsenal.
Li Zhiyun came to another factory building. There were many wooden workbenches in this factory, with tiger tables installed on them, as well as grinders and the like. The craftsmen also made files, vises, calipers and other tools. Of course, there are many machine tools here, but these are all manual.
Some craftsmen are working. He walked to a lathe and watched. The power of this lathe was a wooden wheel with a diameter of three feet. The wooden wheel was covered with an iron weighted wheel. One person turned the wheel to drive the lathe wheel to rotate. The accompanying craftsman said: "It takes a lot of effort to rotate this wheel. On average, one person has to be replaced every hour."
He came to the casting and forging workshop again. There were seven or eight crucibles placed here, and there were many models on the ground, including stone models, clay models, sand models, etc. Ancient casting methods include stone mold casting; pottery mold casting, which is clay mold casting; iron mold casting, which is metal mold casting; in addition, there are lost wax casting and sand mold casting.
He saw a craftsman using iron tongs to bring the molten iron from the crucible and pour it into the sand mold. The molten iron made the sand mold make a "hissing" sound and a trace of blue smoke came out. When the molten iron cooled, Finally, the casting is formed. The other half of the workshop is like a large blacksmith shop, with several furnaces, anvils, hammers, etc. Several craftsmen are forging iron pieces "clinking, clanging", which is forging. Since there is no electric welding, all weapon parts are formed at one time, either cast or forged. After being formed, they are polished and finally blued.
To make modern weapons, in addition to craftsmen and equipment, you also need materials, the most important of which is steel. Since the Han Dynasty, the ancients have learned how to make steel. The main methods include block iron carburizing method, fried steel method, steel filling method, hundred steel making method, fried iron carburizing method, etc. Among them, the fried steel process can generally refine forged steel and The wrought iron and steel filling process mainly produces blade steel with higher carbon content.
Although the quality of the steel at this time was far inferior to the special gun steel of later generations, Li Zhiyun now had limited funds and could not open a steelmaking plant to make good steel, so he could only make do with it. Fortunately, he does not pursue the quality of the weapons he produces. As long as they can reach the level of World War I, he will be satisfied.
Then, Li Zhiyun went to the gun workshop, where many craftsmen were busy making guns. Guns are generally divided into two types. One is the smoothbore gun, commonly known as the gun, also called the bullet gun. The other is a rifled gun, also called a belly gun.
Li Zhiyun planned to produce both types of guns. The bird gun consisted of a barrel, a gunpowder tank, a bolt, a front sight, a gun handle, etc. The bolt was of the tunnel-fire type, which means a piece of flint was clamped on the jaw of the hammer, and the fire hole was set next to it. There is an anvil. When shooting, the trigger is pulled. Under the action of the spring, the flint is hit heavily on the anvil next to the fire door. Sparks appear, igniting the gunpowder and firing.
The belly gun uses a rotating rear-pull bolt. This structure is a non-automatic bolt. The principle is to manually rotate the bolt to one side to unlock, and then pull the bolt backward to compress the firing pin spring and recoil spring, and eject the cartridge case. , and finally the recoil spring pushes the bolt forward, pushes the bullet into the chamber and rotates the bolt to the other side to complete the lock. During World War II, Germany's Mauser 98 and Japan's 38-gun used this type of manual bolt action.
Although Li Zhiyun drew drawings of various weapons, they were only schematic diagrams, and not every part was drawn. Because, he didn't know what some parts looked like at all, and as for the specific size of each part, he had no way of knowing. Therefore, he set up a design department in the factory to specialize in the design of weapons. The dozen or so people in the design department were all former officials of the Sui Dynasty. They used to be in charge of river repair projects and were very expert in surveying and drawing. After the fall of the Sui Dynasty, the world was in chaos and wars were going on everywhere. The court did not need them to repair the rivers, so they lost their jobs. Li Zhiyun found them and asked them to draw drawings. He planned to wait until the Tang Dynasty was unified before letting these people go back to their old profession. This could be regarded as retaining a group of talents for the country.
The people in the design department worked with the craftsmen to study and produce each part based on the weapon principles he provided. After repeated trials, the dimensions were fixed and drawn into drawings after passing the test.
Finally, Li Zhiyun came to the explosives workshop. The Explosives Workshop produces explosives and grenades. After Li Zhiyun left the "Women's Army", the craftsmen continued to study nitroglycerin explosives, constantly conducted experiments, improved the ratio of raw materials, and made the explosives more and more powerful.
In addition to the production of black explosives and nitroglycerin explosives, more powerful chemical explosives are also produced here. The most important raw material for producing chemical explosives is sulfuric acid. Ancient people have been producing sulfuric acid for a long time. Ancient Taoist priests used sulfuric acid to make elixirs. The oldest method of producing sulfuric acid is to use green vitriol as raw material and calcine it in a distillation kettle to produce sulfuric acid. Therefore, the ancients called sulfuric acid "green vitriol oil." Li Zhiyun saw that there were five or six pottery jars used by farmers for pickling vegetables in the corner of the workshop, which were used to contain sulfuric acid.
As for the grenades, they were manufactured with wooden handles. The projectile body was forged from wrought iron, and the guide wire was filled with black powder as the detonating charge.
In the few months since Li Zhiyun left Chang'an, the arsenal had produced samples of various weapons. After the injury on his butt healed, he immediately took people to conduct experiments. But the test results disappointed him very much. Mortars and grenade launchers were unable to shoot out the shells at all. It was unknown whether it was due to the shells or other reasons. The rifle also malfunctioned repeatedly and could not be fired normally. Only the blunderbuss and the grenade met his expectations, and the relatively simple craftsmanship of these two weapons produced satisfactory results.
Only then did Li Zhiyun realize that although his arsenal was not small in scale, the machinery and technology were so backward that they were only equivalent to the level of family workshops in later generations. It was unrealistic to produce weapons with more complicated technology now. Starting from the production of the oldest firearms, we gradually improved the machinery and technology while gradually transitioning to the production of modern weapons.
As a result, he stopped the production of rifles, grenade launchers and mortars, and retained only three research groups to produce small batches after they developed qualified samples.
In addition to producing blunderbuss and hand grenades, Li Zhiyun also asked the arsenal to produce red cannons. This kind of gun is composed of a barrel, a medicine chamber, a breech and other parts. The barrel is an iron smooth bore, and the ammunition is front-loaded. It can fire stone bullets, iron bullets and explosive bombs. It is the same as the bird gun, and the process is relatively simple. Although It is very backward compared with modern artillery, but it is more than enough to deal with armies that do not have any firearms and are only equipped with cold weapons.
