Chapter 916 – The Optical Workshop

As he thought this, two young men in work clothes emerged from a corner and came to greet Lin Hanlong's group. He waved them to wait a moment, then turned and entered his office—a corner of the workshop partitioned off with hollow bricks, with kapok soundproofing boards on the inner walls. He sometimes needed to stay overnight in the workshop and do engineering calculations, requiring a relatively quiet environment.

The office contained just a few tables, some cabinets, and a row of shelves, all piled with document papers, oddly-shaped glass blocks, and machine parts. A small door led to his single-person dormitory. As a transmigrator, this was one of the few privileges he enjoyed.

Lin Hanlong walked to his desk and opened the cabinet. Inside was a small dehumidifier safe, secured with a small Sailing Brand padlock. Lin Hanlong took a ring of keys from his belt and selected one to open the lock—humidity was high in the Lingao summer, and moisture control was essential. From inside, he retrieved his treasures: a cowhide tool belt hung with tools and measuring instruments from the old timeline—a Fluke multimeter, fully functional; a high-powered flashlight whose original lithium battery was nearly dead (he wondered if Zhong Lishi could make a substitute). From his laptop bag, he took out a calculator—a TI graphing calculator he'd bought at great expense before the transmigration, quite powerful. He clipped everything to the appropriate spots on his belt. Finally, he stuffed the entire laptop bag into the dehumidifier safe and locked it again.

"Chief Lin! Here's today's data." One of the young men in work clothes saw him emerge and hastened to hand over a thick notebook. Both were students; per the academic schedule, they had to spend several hours each week doing labor at various factories.

Lin Hanlong took it and skimmed through. "Come on, let's check the furnace."

The furnace was the newly built optical workpiece annealing furnace—a square black box clad in fire bricks. A door on the upper side could be opened to slide the workpiece out on rails. Below was a firebox; a gas bag outside the workshop fed in coal gas, with adjustable dampers and air vents. On top of the annealing furnace sat several crude pointer-type gauges without glass covers; the scales under the needles were hand-drawn.

All glassmaking generally involved annealing. Lin Hanlong sometimes wondered why protagonists in novels who made glass never got injured by glass shards. Under normal circumstances, rapidly cooled cast glass had enormous internal mechanical stress. Thick glass blanks were liable to shatter during processing. That's why glass factories had annealing kilns: reheat blanks to near-melting temperature, then let them cool slowly. The right temperature and cooling rate were specific to each factory's process. When Xiao Bailang set up the glass factory, he'd built an annealing kiln and consulted process manuals from the Grand Library, but conditions here differed from the old timeline—you couldn't copy procedures exactly. The actual temperatures and times had been worked out bit by bit through trial and error by the glass factory's transmigrators and workers.

Now Lin Hanlong and his team had to figure out the correct temperature-control data for optical glass products through similar experimentation. The two students from school served as human temperature controllers, doing their best to keep furnace temperature on the predetermined cooling curve.

As they neared the annealing furnace, the heat hit them. Lin Hanlong was used to it. The workshop's ventilation was decent, but with outdoor temperatures around thirty degrees, there was no better cooling method than forced mechanical ventilation.

Lin Hanlong handed the data notebook to his apprentice. "Junjie, take a look at this data."

The apprentice studied the data and charts carefully, then looked up. "Master, I think this data looks good." The two young men beside them visibly relaxed.

Lin Hanlong pointed at several numbers. "What do you make of these?"

The apprentice thought for a moment. "The thermometer was swapped, but the reading was still low—that means it's the furnace itself."

Lin Hanlong grunted, took out his multimeter, and connected a thermocouple probe. He inserted the probe into the measurement port on top of the furnace and turned the display to show the apprentice.

"Both match."

Lin Hanlong nodded. "We'll fix it next time we do maintenance."

He turned to the two young men. "You can put out the fire now. Let it cool naturally. Tell the next shift it has to cool to at least sixty degrees before opening the furnace."

Lin Hanlong then walked over to a spherical grinding machine. Since he'd made the first hand-powered grinder, the Machinery Factory had produced four more specialized grinders. This one before him was the newest. The design was basically the same, but the biggest change was switching the drive to shaft-and-belt, and replacing many of the perishable wooden parts with metal ones. There were also additional adjustment devices for various parameters. At the moment, this grinder had been completely disassembled, its innards strewn across the floor. Lin Hanlong squatted down and examined a watermelon-sized bevel gear. Several teeth had been stripped.

"Junjie, go to the Science and Technology Department office and ask Chief Sun Li to come over."

This new equipment had been in service less than a week before breaking down. Yesterday, Lin Hanlong had disassembled the grinder himself to see if he could repair it on the spot—and discovered the fault was beyond him.

The apprentice acknowledged and left. Lin Hanlong stood and walked toward another corner of the workshop.

A thin, middle-aged man hurried over, bowing and nodding. "Sir—ah, Chief, Chief, good day." This half-trained native middle-aged worker would normally have pounced the moment Lin Hanlong entered the workshop and trailed him everywhere. After repeated scoldings from Lin Hanlong, he'd finally learned to stay at his post. Now he pointed proudly at several large glass bottles.

"Chief, look—as you instructed, we've crushed more of this stone powder, all sieved and graded."

Lin Hanlong glanced at the machine behind the man. "How's the ball mill running?"

"Good, very good."

Lin Hanlong reached for the work log hanging beside the machine:

"Any looseness? Is vibration normal?" Normally the operator was supposed to fill in the machine log, but illiterate workers still in remedial classes couldn't manage it. When National School students came, they could help out—but Lin Hanlong had already assigned them tasks, so he just filled it in himself.

Filling out logs, checking equipment, and inspecting inventory and products took Lin Hanlong about an hour after arriving.

As he was finishing the log, he heard someone call. Turning, he saw Zhan Wuya, Sun Li, and others walking toward him. He dashed off the last few strokes, signed his name, and put the notebook back.

The Machinery Factory transmigrator technicians gathered around the broken spherical grinder.

"Obviously a casting problem. Look here—classic inverse chill." Lin Hanlong pointed to the fracture surface. Everyone nodded; no one spoke.

This bevel gear was cast, but something had clearly gone wrong during casting.

"Heh, these things happen." Zhan Wuya stepped in to smooth things over. "The scrap pile of parts for re-melting is mountain-high. The Reliability Office can't even keep up with failure analysis."

"Breakage is fine as long as it doesn't ruin my glass." Lin Hanlong wasn't going to make a fuss—this kind of thing happened every day across all of Lingao. Even naval artillery had suffered gear-fracture incidents. "Can it be fixed?"

Sun Li, who'd been examining the fracture closely, shook his head. "I'm afraid not. The cracks are visible to the naked eye; without proper inspection, who knows how deep they go." He made a gesture. "If there were no cracks, cold welding could probably handle it."

Zhan Wuya patted Lin Hanlong's shoulder. "We'll make you a better one." After the campaign, munitions production had slowed; previously stockpiled materials were still available, giving Zhan Wuya some confidence.

"We could have a new one in a week. Use the one from the flat-surface grinder for now."

Lin Hanlong shook his head. "Can't move that one. The Navy wants the binoculars urgently."

Zhan Wuya snorted. The optical plant's first product batch included the Thirty-One Pattern Army 8x Monocular Telescope (Trial)—basically a simple refractor in a bamboo-tube case. The Navy disdained such crude gear; they demanded wide field of view, high light transmission, comfortable grip, good sealing, and corrosion resistance. They wanted binoculars that would outclass the Army's equipment at a glance. Mass-producing binoculars required the flat-surface grinder to make right-angle prisms—which touched on questions of additional investment and staffing for the optical plant. Fortunately, Wang Luobin in distant Sanya also supported binocular production—he could mount fixed-position units in the watchtowers. As an optics background transmigrator, Wang Luobin emotionally favored expanding the optical industry.

"For flat grinding, we could have everything together in three to five days." Zhan Wuya paused. "Army's earthy, Navy's fancy—that's no lie. Wonder what the Marines want."

The group chatted a while longer, then dispersed. For the others, it was almost dinner time; after eating, a bit of work, then evening rest and entertainment—and if they had the energy, rolling around with a maid. For Lin Hanlong, the day was just beginning. Nighttime brought stable temperatures, better for optical parts processing. More importantly, he could monopolize the Science and Technology Department's power output and network.

At five o'clock, "light music" played over loudspeakers across Lingao. Workers everywhere knew this was the call for night-shift workers. When the music played a second time, shift supervisors would take roll at workshop entrances, then hand over from day shift. Optical workshop workers trickled in, burping, picking their teeth, joking among themselves. Food stalls all over had dinner early for night-shift workers so they could eat their fill before work.

Before the second music cue, everyone had arrived. Lin Hanlong stood to one side, hands behind his back, watching his workshop supervisor line up the workers for roll call. He thought they'd lined up as neatly as soldiers—the working class really was naturally disciplined. Unfortunately, though most were young, except for a few robust specimens, most showed the effects of long-term malnutrition—thin and weak, probably not much use on a battlefield. He shook his head.

"Chief Lin! Optical Workshop night shift reporting: thirty-seven expected, thirty-seven present. Awaiting instructions!"

Lin Hanlong cleared his throat and stepped forward. "Comrades! I have one thing to say today. As you all know, yesterday Grinder Number Four had a problem. Fragments flew out. I want to emphasize: first, our machinery's safety measures worked well. The fragments were stopped by the safety net; no one was hurt. Second, our safety awareness is still inadequate. We haven't fully mastered the safety protocols. When the grinder broke, people gathered to watch—but no one went to pull the emergency stop lever. That won't do! To put it harshly, that's courting death!"

Seeing no reaction from the workers, Lin Hanlong sighed inwardly and let his voice turn stern.

"From now on, anyone who fails to follow safety regulations will have their pay docked! Squad leaders especially take note—you bear direct responsibility. Also, we'll have unscheduled safety drills starting tonight." The workers' expressions grew serious. Pay deductions were serious business. Safety drills cut into rest time—also serious.

Lin Hanlong saw everyone watching him attentively and felt satisfied. "That's all. Get to work."

The workshop safety officer checked each machine's power transmission system, then the gas valves. Finally, he lit the workshop's gas lamps. The darkening workshop was suddenly flooded with light. It was gas lamps that made Lingao's large-scale night-shift production possible. Every time Lin Hanlong saw this scene, he thought whoever invented the gas lamp had made a contribution in this timeline no less than Edison's.

The glass workpieces to be processed were already "plated"—meaning they'd been firmly bonded with pitch and beeswax adhesive into shallow cone-shaped metal trays, then screwed onto spherical fixtures, which were in turn mounted on the grinder's spindle. The grinder crew worked in pairs, checking the work order to confirm that the plated parts matched the grinder settings.

The general service team's abrasive section similarly followed the work order to deliver prepared abrasive paste to each grinder, then began mixing the next batch. The plating section was busy using machinery to press new workpieces into metal trays—a demanding task requiring speed while adhesive was still hot, yet perfect alignment. The machine section had one team of two busy starting up a grinder that was already prepared. The mechanism had been manually tested without issues; lubrication had been added. The grinder section confirmed everything was normal.

Per the work order, this grinder was doing rough grinding tonight, so a faster speed was chosen; the belt had to be moved to a smaller pulley. After moving it, they re-tensioned the belt, then engaged the clutch lever to connect the overhead fixed pulley to the main power shaft. The machinery creaked, then the grinder began turning and the noise faded. The machine operator glanced at the tachometer, signaled "all normal" to the grinder operator, then stepped aside to fill in the work log. The grinder operator picked up a small brush, dipped it in abrasive, and carefully dabbed it onto the rotating workpieces. Once all workpieces were coated, he lowered the grinding dish and set it oscillating. This grinder had entered normal operation.

Before long, all the other equipment in the workshop also roared to life one by one. The optical workshop's night shift had officially begun.

Lin Hanlong made another circuit of the workshop, checking for abnormal conditions or sounds. Only then did he return to his office doorway, where he found Wu Nanhai sitting on a wooden-slat bench in the workshop rest area.

"Huh? Old Wu, why didn't you say something? Just sitting here?"

Wu Nanhai, who'd witnessed everything, let out a long breath: "Old Lin, this is really precision work you've got here!"

Lin Hanlong gestured for him to talk in the office. Several naturalized staff, as well as Chuqing, were already waiting at the office door. He glanced at Chuqing and remembered that pack of limited-edition cigars he'd given away—Wu Nanhai had specifically sent some when he'd asked Lin Hanlong to make a batch of magnifying glasses.

"Welcome, welcome." Lin Hanlong told his apprentice to bring tea for Wu Nanhai. "I've got nothing here—sorry for the poor hospitality."

"No worries. I'm here on business!" Wu Nanhai laughed. "I asked for fifty magnifying glasses and you made them in a month. Impressive!"

"If it took a year, what would be the point of industrialization?" Lin Hanlong said, taking a towel his apprentice brought and wiping his face.

"By the way, I hear the Ming's Nanjing can make reading glasses and such by hand-grinding crystal. Want me to file a request to bring in some native eyeglass craftsmen to help?"

"That would be nice if we could get them, but I doubt it would mean much. One handcraft artisan—how many lenses can he make in a day? Just luxury goods for the rich and powerful. I'm machine-grinding now. Even if quality isn't quite as good yet, my cost and output are incomparable." He paused. "Though I'm very interested in crystal. Supposedly there's a big crystal deposit near Donghai, Lianyungang..."

"Ha, the Survey Team says there's fine crystal right here on Hainan."

As they talked, someone pushed a flatbed cart over. Lin Hanlong had them lift off a flat wooden crate and set it on the floor beside them. Opening it revealed a layer of straw padding. Removing the padding exposed five small boxes, separated by straw. Lin Hanlong reached in and took out a small box, opening it. Inside was a magnifying glass, nestled into the velvet-lined bottom.