Chi Fei, who was far away in Jiujiang, was also very happy after receiving the secret report sent by the spies and the letter from Jian Shuqi.

He doesn't have many friends, and Jian Shuqi can be said to be his best friend.

Through Jian Shuqi's letter, Chi Fei learned that this guy had left the capital and returned to his hometown in the name of returning to his hometown.

As if he had found an outlet, Jian Shuqi told all kinds of things that had happened in the capital for more than a year, and expressed his thoughts and emotions under each thing.

From the indignation he expressed in his letters, it can be seen that he was full of disappointment with the Great Wei court.

Especially about how the imperial court treated the hundreds of thousands of displaced people, it made him feel extremely angry and desperate.

In order to appease him, Chi Fei wrote down in detail how the northwest would resettle the displaced people, and attached a sketch of the terraced rice fields.

Regarding Jian Shuqi's desire to help find sweet potatoes and corn, Chi Fei felt that it was better for him not to get involved, so he persuaded him not to meddle in this matter in the letter, so as not to get into trouble.

After explaining these things, Chi Fei wrote down his recent situation by the way to reassure him.

At the end of the letter, Chi Fei also specially told him to remember to burn it immediately after reading the letter, so as not to fall into the hands of others and become a handle against him.

After writing the letter, he immediately ordered the spies to send the letter to Jiangnan as soon as possible and handed it to Jian Shuqi in person, and there should be no mistakes.

It's rare to reconnect with friends, and Chi Fei is in a very good mood all day.

With this good mood, he went to the workshop to walk around again.

With the addition of a large number of new craftsmen, the workshop has now more than doubled in size, and several small workshops with different divisions of labor have been built in it.

This separation not only increases the confidentiality of each process, but also allows the craftsmen to concentrate more on their work, which can be described as killing two birds with one stone.

Originally, Chi Fei divided the entire gun-making process into six departments according to the modern factory model.

One is the barrel department, the second is the ignition device department, the third is the handle department, the fourth is the overall assembly department, the fifth is the lead bullet production department, and the sixth is the ammunition packaging department.

Each department will be divided into two or three, or even five or six processes, depending on the degree of difficulty. Each process is in charge of a special person and is completed in a separate small workshop.

Through such a subdivision, the work efficiency has been increased several times in an instant, and many parts can be quickly manufactured at an unprecedented speed.

But then the problem came again, although many parts were made, there were all kinds of problems when assembling, and some of them could not be installed at all.

Chi Fei took a closer look at the parts and soon knew the reason.

These parts are all made by hand, and since they are handmade, it is inevitable that there will be different degrees of deviation.

Especially the new craftsmen, there are few parts that can be used.

Muskets are very delicate things, and sometimes a part is just a few millimeters off and it doesn't fit. Not to mention that if you want to combine so many parts together, the slightest deviation can easily cause assembly failure.

If you want to avoid this, you can go back to the old way: a craftsman makes and assembles the parts from start to finish.

Since the whole musket was made by one man, he naturally knew what the problem was, so it was easier to pick out the problematic parts and change them until they were usable.

However, Chi Fei didn't want to go back, mainly because this method was too time-consuming and labor-intensive, and it was impossible to achieve mass production.

Even if the problem of slow barrel drilling has been solved by a simple drilling machine, it can take two or three months for a craftsman to make the whole musket at the earliest.

This is still something that only skilled craftsmen can do, and it is possible to replace it with a craftsman who has just taken over, and it may take half a year casually.

With such efficiency, it is simply impossible to equip the army on a large scale.

Moreover, this method can easily leak the manufacturing process of the musket, and it is also undesirable from the point of view of secrecy.

After discussing with his eldest brother Ning Yabai and Wu Craftsman, Chi Fei came to two conclusions:

First, the new batch of craftsmen are not familiar enough with their craftsmanship, so the deviation of the parts made is too large, which can only be made up by them by practicing more and doing more.

Second, it is necessary to add another department to the original six departments, which is responsible for the work of grasping the parts up to standard, and it will be temporarily named the maintenance department.

The work of the maintenance department is mainly in two aspects: one is to return the parts with too large deviations to the original craftsman for modification or redo; The second is to fine-tune the parts with small deviations internally until they can be used.

In this way, it should be possible to reduce the problem of excessive scrapping of parts.

In order to motivate these craftsmen, Chi Fei also proposed an unprecedented piecework reward method.

That is to say, every time a craftsman makes a part that can be used up to the standard, the bonus will be increased according to the difficulty of the part.

For example, if you make a working barrel, you will reward the craftsman with a hundred pennies; If you make a good handle of a gun, you will be rewarded with fifty cents and so on.

Through such incentives, it is naturally possible for craftsmen to work more automatically and spontaneously, which is much better than scolding when they make mistakes.

Sure enough, as soon as Chi Fei's piecework reward method was proposed, the atmosphere of the entire workshop changed, and all the craftsmen became highly motivated, and everyone's eyes seemed to be glowing green.

As a result, driven by the new addition of the maintenance department and the piecework reward method, in just one month, the number of scrapped parts began to decrease significantly, and the assembly failure rate of the whole gun was gradually reduced.

For a while, all the craftsmen were engrossed in their work, and the whole workshop was in a warm atmosphere of chasing after me.

That's a lot of money, who doesn't want to earn it.

Seeing that her brother-in-law only mentioned these two small changes, which improved the work efficiency of the entire workshop so much, Ning Yabai was really convinced.

He sometimes couldn't understand how his brother-in-law could come up with so many whimsical ideas.

And almost all of these wonderful ideas are practical and effective solutions to problems, which is the most powerful.

Just when Chi Fei's musket workshop was in full swing, Jian Shuqi was also in full swing looking for foreigners everywhere to inquire about the news of corn and sweet potatoes.

Although Chi Fei had already advised him not to meddle in this matter in the letter, so as not to get into trouble, Jian Shuqi was unwilling to wait like this.

Especially when he knew that corn and sweet potatoes, two overseas crops, were life-saving food in famine years with extremely high yields, he couldn't sit still anymore and was determined to help his friends find these two crops.

Jian Shuqi is a smart person in his own right, and after going through so many things, he already has the ability to think independently.

Although his friend Chi Fei said in the letter that he had solved the problem of feeding the hundreds of thousands of displaced people by building terraces.

But Jian Shuqi knew that the grain yield of the newly opened raw fields was very low. Only mature fields that have been cultivated for many years can have a relatively stable grain output.

In other words, most of these freshly cultivated terraced fields alone are not enough, and the Northwest Army will definitely have to subsidize a lot of grain to feed these hundreds of thousands of displaced people.

This is a big burden for the northwest and northeast, which already do not produce much grain.

If you can really find the two high-yielding crops that my friend said, corn and sweet potatoes, it will greatly alleviate this food shortage.

Therefore, Jian Shuqi ran around without hesitation to inquire about corn and sweet potatoes.

This is not only to help his friend Chi Fei, but also to help the hundreds of thousands of people who have become homeless.

He finally found what he had to do.

He was so excited about this that he didn't feel tired even if he worked hard.