Chapter 148: The Optics Workshop

As he was thinking, two teenagers in work clothes emerged from a corner and approached Lin Hanlong’s group. Lin Hanlong waved his hand, telling them to wait a moment. Then he turned and entered his office—a corner of the workshop partitioned off with hollow bricks, the inner walls lined with sound-absorbing kapok boards. He sometimes needed to spend the night in the workshop and do engineering calculations, requiring a relatively quiet environment.

The office had only a few desks, several cabinets, and a row of shelves, all piled high with documents, strangely shaped glass blocks, and mechanical parts. There was also a small door leading to his single dormitory. As a Yuanen, this was one of the few privileges he enjoyed.

Lin Hanlong walked to his desk and opened a cabinet door. Inside was a small moisture-proof cabinet, secured with a small “Sailing Ship” brand padlock. Lin Hanlong took a string of keys from his belt, selected one, and opened the lock—the humidity in Lin’gao was very high in the summer, making moisture-proofing essential. From inside, he took out his treasure: a leather tool belt, on which hung a bunch of tools and measuring instruments brought from the original time: a full-featured Fluke multimeter; a high-intensity flashlight, whose original lithium battery was almost dead—he wondered if Zhong Lishi could find a substitute. He then took out a calculator from his computer bag, a powerful TI graphing calculator he had bought for a high price before the transmigration. He attached all these items to their respective places on his belt. Finally, he stuffed the entire computer bag into the moisture-proof cabinet and locked the door.

“Chief Lin! Here’s today’s data,” one of the teenagers in work clothes said, quickly handing him a large, thick notebook as he came out. These two teenagers were students, and according to the school system’s requirements, they had to spend several hours each week working in various factories.

Lin Hanlong took it and glanced at it briefly. “Let’s go, let’s check the furnace.”

The furnace was the newly built annealing furnace for optical components. It was a square black box, encased in refractory bricks. On the upper side was a door that could be pulled open, and the workpiece could be pulled out along a slide rail. The lower part was a firebox, connected to a gas bag outside the workshop, with adjustable fire doors and air inlets. On top of the annealing furnace were several simple pointer-type instruments, without even glass cover plates, the scales underneath the pointers being hand-drawn.

In glass manufacturing, the annealing process was generally involved. Lin Hanlong sometimes wondered while reading novels why the protagonists who made glass were never injured by glass fragments. Under normal circumstances, rapidly cooled cast glass products have great internal mechanical stress. A slightly thicker glass blank is in danger of shattering with the slightest processing. Therefore, a glass factory must have an annealing kiln to anneal the finished glass products: reheating the blank to a temperature close to its melting point, and then allowing it to cool slowly. As for the appropriate temperature and the cooling rate, this was the specific process of the glass factory. When Xiao Bailang was setting up the glass factory, although he had built an annealing kiln and obtained a process manual from the Grand Library, the production conditions in this time were different from those in the old world and could not be completely copied. The specific temperature and time were accumulated through the trial and error of the Yuanen and workers in the glass factory.

Now, Lin Hanlong and his subordinates also had to learn through trial and error to correctly master the temperature control data for optical glass products. The two teenagers from the school were the human temperature control devices. They had to try their best to keep the furnace temperature on the predetermined cooling curve.

As soon as he approached the annealing furnace, he felt a blast of heat. Lin Hanlong was used to it. Although the ventilation in the workshop was decent, the outside temperature was now thirty degrees. There was no better way to cool down than with mechanical forced ventilation.

Lin Hanlong handed the notebook with the recorded data to his apprentice. “Junjie, take a look at this data.”

The apprentice carefully examined the data and charts, then looked up. “Master, I think the data this time is very good.” The two teenagers beside him visibly relaxed.

Lin Hanlong pointed to a few numbers. “What do you think of these data points?”

The apprentice thought for a moment. “We changed the thermometer, but the reading is still low, which means it’s a problem with the furnace itself.”

Lin Hanlong grunted in agreement and took out his multimeter, connecting a thermocouple probe. He then inserted the probe into the small measurement hole on top of the furnace. He turned the display screen for his apprentice to see.

“They’re the same on both sides.”

Lin Hanlong nodded. “Then we’ll fix it during the next overhaul.”

He turned to the two teenagers on the side. “The furnace fire can be extinguished. Let it cool down naturally. Tell the next shift that the furnace can only be opened when it has cooled down to about sixty degrees.”

Lin Hanlong then walked over to a spherical grinding machine. Since he had made the first manual grinding machine, the machinery factory had made four new specialized ones. The one before him was the latest. The structure was roughly the same, but the biggest change was that the power source was changed to a transmission shaft and belt. At the same time, a large number of metal parts replaced the less durable wooden ones, and many more devices for adjusting various parameters were added. Right now, this grinding machine was in pieces, its innards laid out on the floor. Lin Hanlong squatted down and stared at a watermelon-sized bevel gear. Several of its teeth were already broken.

“Junjie, go to the Ministry of Science and Technology office and call Chief Sun Li. Tell him I’d like him to come over.”

This new equipment had broken down less than a week after being put into use. Yesterday, Lin Hanlong had disassembled the grinding machine himself to see if he could fix it on the spot, but he found that he couldn’t handle the problem.

The apprentice acknowledged and went out. Lin Hanlong stood up and walked towards another corner of the workshop.

A thin middle-aged man hurried over, bowing and scraping. “Master! Ah, Chief, good day, Chief.” This halfway-native middle-aged worker would normally have rushed over and followed Lin Hanlong as soon as he entered the workshop. After being reprimanded by Lin Hanlong several times, he was finally able to stick to his post. He pointed to several large glass bottles as if presenting a treasure.

“Chief, look, I’ve crushed more of this stone powder as you instructed, and it’s all been sieved separately.”

Lin Hanlong glanced at the machine behind the middle-aged man. “How’s the ball mill?”

“Good, very good.”

Lin Hanlong reached out and picked up the work log hanging next to the machine.

“Is anything loose? Is the vibration normal?” The machine’s work log should have been filled out by the operator himself, but the workers, who were still attending literacy classes, couldn’t fill them out. The students from the National School could help when they were here, but Lin Hanlong had already assigned them work, so he just filled it out himself.

Filling out records, checking equipment, and inspecting inventory and products took up about an hour of Lin Hanlong’s time after he started work.

As Lin Hanlong was about to finish filling out the record, he heard someone call him. He turned around and saw Zhan Wuya, Sun Li, and a group of others walking towards him. He quickly finished the record with a few strokes, signed his name, and put the notebook back.

The Yuanen technicians from the machinery factory gathered around the broken spherical grinding machine.

“It’s obviously a casting problem. Look here, a typical chill,” Lin Hanlong said, pointing at the fracture surface of the part. Everyone nodded, but no one spoke.

This bevel gear was cast, but apparently, there was a problem during the casting process.

“Hehe, it’s inevitable, it’s inevitable,” Zhan Wuya said, trying to smooth things over. “The scrap yard is piled high with parts to be remelted. The people in the reliability office can’t even keep up with the failure analysis.”

“It’s okay if it breaks, as long as it doesn’t break my glass,” Lin Hanlong said, not intending to pursue the matter further. This kind of thing happened every day all over Lin’gao. Even the cannons on the warships had had accidents like broken gears, let alone here. “Can it be repaired?”

Sun Li, who had been looking closely at the fracture surface, shook his head. “I’m afraid not. The crack is visible to the naked eye, and we don’t know how deep it is without NDT.” He gestured, “If there were no cracks, it could have been fixed with cold welding.”

Zhan Wuya patted Lin Hanlong on the shoulder. “We’ll make you a better one.” After the war, arms production had slowed down, and there were still some reserved materials, so Zhan Wuya spoke with confidence.

“It’ll take a week to make a new one. You can use the one from the plane grinding machine for now.”

Lin Hanlong shook his head. “I can’t move the one from the plane grinder. The navy is in a hurry for the binoculars.”

Zhan Wuya grunted. The first batch of products from the optics factory included the Type-3 army-use 8x monocular telescope (trial), which was actually just a simple refracting telescope with a bamboo tube for protection and carrying. The navy disdained such a crude thing. They demanded good field of view, high light transmittance, comfortable grip, and good sealing and corrosion resistance. They wanted a pair of binoculars to show up the army’s equipment. Mass-producing binoculars required a plane grinding machine to make right-angle prisms, which involved additional investment and expansion of the optics factory. Fortunately, Wang Luobin in far-off Sanya also supported making binoculars—he could use them as fixed installations in various watchtowers. As someone with a background in optics, Wang Luobin was also emotionally supportive of expanding the scale of the optical industry.

“For the plane grinder, we can get the parts together in three to five days at most,” Zhan Wuya said, pausing. “Army rustic, Navy fancy, it’s really true. I wonder what the Marine Corps wants?”

The men chatted for a while longer and then gradually dispersed. For the others, it was now close to dinner time. After eating and doing a little something, they could begin their evening rest and recreation. Those with energy could even go to bed with their maids. But for Lin Hanlong, the day was just beginning. The temperature at night was more stable, which was conducive to the processing of optical parts. More importantly, he could have exclusive use of the Ministry of Science and Technology’s power output and network.