Zhang Baigui said in a deep voice: "I was about to tell you about this matter, the imitation of the bowl of mouthballs has progressed, but there is a problem that needs to be solved!" ”

Liu Juntao asked, "What's the problem?" ”

"Gun!"

"My craftsmen and I have studied the bowl mouth gun and found that the construction of the gun pipe is the most critical part of the construction. However, now there is a disagreement on how to build the pipe, some craftsmen advocate the splicing method, while others advocate the use of double-layer steel plates to directly roll together. ”

"What does Master Zhang mean?"

Zhang Baigui said with a wry smile: "To be honest, I have no idea now. ”

The two methods of building the fire gun tube mentioned by Zhang Baigui are known to Liu Juntao, and these two technologies have appeared in the early Ming Dynasty and tend to mature.

By the end of the Ming Dynasty, these two techniques were clearly recorded in the book.

The description of "Heavenly Creation" is like this: a short pipe is forged with several wrought iron bars, and then two or three short pipes are welded into a long pipe, which is the splicing method. The advantage of this method is that it can make long pipes, and the cooling of the segmented pipes is relatively uniform, and the degree of solidity is guaranteed. But the shortcomings are also obvious, the quality of the tube is determined by the welding of sections, and this welding technology depends on experience, without more than ten years of accumulation, can not produce qualified products, this is the so-called Seiko route.

And Qi Jiguang recorded in the "New Book of Ji Xiao" that the double-layer steel plate was directly rolled up. The advantage of this method is that the barrel does not have to be welded, but the disadvantage is that the long barrel cannot be made, and the cooling of the whole tube is not uniform when forging. As a result, there is a difference in the texture of the front and back of the pipe body, and if the cooling difference is too large, it is easy to blow up.

Liu Juntao thought for a while, and then said: "Since everyone has differences, then I will make a decision!" ”

Hearing this, Zhang Baigui suddenly came to his senses and asked, "How to decide?" ”

"Early tomorrow morning, Master Zhang will gather the craftsmen who are responsible for making the fire gun, and I will teach on the spot!"

"Will this work?"

"Of course!"

Liu Juntao said with a smile: "It's just that you have to do some preparation work first." In this way, since the bowl mouth gun has been thoroughly eaten, then I will have a fire gun production! Let's not build any bowls, go straight to the artifact! ”

Zhang Baigui hurriedly asked, "Artifact?" What an artifact! ”

As soon as the words fell, Liu Juntao took out the bird gun pattern that he had already drawn, and it was still a flint hairstyle!

Zhang Baigui took a closer look and exclaimed: "The style of this fire gun is much better than the bowl mouth gun!" ”

"Of course!"

According to the historical materials that Liu Juntao read, at the end of the Ming Dynasty, it took about a month for a craftsman to build a bird's gun, and he needed forty catties of pig iron, and in the end he could only smelt seven or eight catties of fine iron

In this picture painted by Liu Juntao, there is an extra lid above the medicine pool of the bird's gun, and when the trigger is pulled, the lid on the medicine pool will automatically open, and then the iron clip that hooks the fire rope will be pressed into the medicine pool. Release the trigger, the iron clip resets, and the medicine pool cover also returns to its original position, covering the medicine pool.

This ensures that the bird can be fired rain or shine!

It was this small detail that amazed Zhang Baigui, and at the same time said that he and his craftsmen needed a little time to ponder.

Early the next morning, Liu Juntao arrived at the military battle bureau early.

As soon as he entered the courtyard, Liu Juntao saw that Zhang Baigui had already brought more than 60 craftsmen to wait in front of the forging table, ready to wait for Liu Juntao's on-site teaching.

Seeing this, Liu Juntao didn't say much, and directly asked Zhang Baigui to pick out a group of craftsmen who were recognized as having the best skills, and prepared to try out the bird gun under Liu Juntao's command.

The blacksmith who was picked out was surnamed Wang, and no one else remembered his name, but remembered that he was called Wang Yihammer, because the skill of hammering ironware was superb, so he had this nickname.

The other blacksmith is Wang Yihammer's apprentice, the two are not only skilled, but also cooperate all year round, and they are also very tacit.

At this time, Wang Yihammer took his apprentices, according to Liu Juntao's instructions, first to build the barrel of the bird's gun, then make other parts of the gun, and finally assemble it.

The first step is to build the pipe.

I saw that under the command of Liu Juntao, Wang Yihammer and his apprentices used a steel core that had been prepared in advance to make cold bones, first burned the wrought iron to make the pipe until it was red-hot, and then took out the blank, and used a hammer to knock the hot wrought iron outside the steel core and roll it into an iron pipe.

And in the process of cladding iron, the steel core is constantly extracted and cooled with water to prevent the steel core and wrought iron from being welded together. The thickness of the rolled iron pipe should also be about one centimeter. Wang Yihammer is very skilled in this step, and the movements are like flowing water in the same industry, and the apprentice next to him also cooperates with him tacitly.

At this time, if you follow the method of making bird guns in the Ming army, the second step is welding.

The Ming Dynasty lacked knowledge of ballistics, and believed that the longer the firebolt, the more powerful it was, so that in order to increase the length, the firebolt body was rolled into a single barrel, and then welded section by section, which developed to the later Manchu Qing Dynasty's lifting gun, and the barrel was even two meters long. Pipes made by this welding method are easy to blow up and bor, and craftsmen regard whether or not they are welded seamlessly as the key to the success or failure of guns.

This is how Hu Dexing handed over the bowl to Liu Juntao.

By the end of the Ming Dynasty, the craftsmen of the Ming army were opportunistic and caused many accidents. Ji Xiaoxin recorded in the new book: "Recently, there are few people who are ill in this area, and they do not complain and instruct the craftsmen to listen to them rolled into iron cylinders, uneven in thickness and thickness, and even rolled into a single cylinder, which will be damaged by explosion." ”

The easier it is to explode, the more reluctant the soldiers are to use it, so that the Ming Dynasty has produced a total of tens of thousands of bird guns, but there are very few that can be used in actual combat by the actual equipment troops, and the most elite Guanning iron cavalry still uses the original three-eyed guns!

At this time, the method guided by Liu Juntao is a completely different double-layer composite gun, different from the single-barrel welding method, Liu Juntao's method is to wrap red iron on the steel core, when the first layer of iron is wrapped, another layer is wrapped on this layer of gun, so that the joint of the inner gun is wrapped by the outer layer of gunning to form a composite body.

From a technical point of view, the double-layer composite gun is more scientific than the single-tube welded gun, and the gun body joint is stronger, although this kind of gun tube can not make a very long bird gun tube, but the caliber can be made larger than the first bird gun, so the power is also greater in a limited distance.

In the process of building the gun pipe, Wang Yihammer thought that the short pipe was not as far as the long pipe according to his previous experience, so he explained it to Liu Juntao, but seeing that Liu Juntao insisted on it, he didn't say anything anymore.

The second step is to trim the bore.

At this time, the barrel is still a rough embryo, and the core is not straight, and the inside of the chamber is also rough and uneven, in addition to polishing the outside of the tube body smooth, the most important thing is to use a drill bit to drill the barrel big, drill smooth.

In the Ming Dynasty, the general drill bits are made of fallen steel, the rigidity is not very hard, and they are all manual drills, so half of the time required to build the bird gun is in the drill chamber, and only one inch can be drilled at most every day, and it can be as long as a month when you want to finish drilling.

Ji Xiaoxinshu recorded: "The original hole of the bird is drilled with a steel drill, and the drill is a few inches a day, until the end, and the drill is light in January." ”

In Liu Juntao's view, the production efficiency of Ming Jun bird guns is outrageously low. There are two ways to solve the problem, one is to improve the drill bit, and the other is to change the drilling method.

The steel used to make drill bits is very easy to solve, and now the War Bureau can refine high-quality steel, which can not only be used to make drill bits, but also can be used to build lathes, punches and other equipment that must be developed in the future.

As for the drilling method, Liu Juntao thought of using a hydrodynamic simple lathe. In the future, when the conditions are ripe, Liu Juntao plans to change the proposed lathe to stainless steel.

The so-called simple lathe is an enlarged horizontal hand drill, but it uses water power instead of hand crank.

The original drilling is a manual inch by inch drilling, and vertical drilling, time-consuming and laborious, the use of simple lathe is to fix the barrel horizontally on a shelf that can be rotated by itself, the drill bit cutter is fed horizontally, so that the efficiency of drilling is several times higher than the original, it was originally necessary to drill a month to drill out a gun tube, now it only takes five or six days to drill a high-quality gun tube with smooth inner chamber.

At this time, Liu Juntao also handed over the drawings of the hydrodynamic simple lathe to Zhang Baigui and asked him to build it immediately in the War Bureau.

Fortunately, when the military war bureau was being built, Liu Juntao had already considered that water power might be used, so he ordered someone to divert a small river outside the Yushan market in advance, and built a small dam outside the military war bureau for use.

The successful production of the gun tube can also be regarded as an improvement of the original process, and the next production is a revolutionary improvement.