The arquebus was produced, but Chen Xian found a new problem.

The production efficiency is too low, three workers, it takes a month to produce a gun.

Much of the time and manpower is wasted on manual drilling.

To reaming a barrel to a suitable diameter, with Chen Xian's technological means at this time, it is necessary to increase the diameter of the drill bit many times little by little in order to achieve the goal.

To be more efficient, you have to be more efficient.

Chen Xian began to design a drilling equipment for the barrel drilling process.

The final shape is a wooden horizontal drilling machine, which looks like a lathe, except that it is not a motor that drives the window shaft, but a winch that is shaken by a person.

The worker stands at one end of the drilling machine and rotates the winch, which can drive the shaft of the drilling machine to rotate.

The other end of the shaft faces a lathe-like rail, made entirely of hardwood, on which a slide with a clamp is mounted.

The front end of the shaft is connected to a steel round tube with two threaded holes on the side of the round tube and two sperotriggers mounted in the threaded holes.

This round pipe is where the drill bit is installed, and the end of the long drill bit is inserted into this round hole, and then two butterfly bolts are tightened to clamp the drill bit.

The clamps on the slider are actually two rings, which are fixed to the wooden slider underneath.

When working, the barrel blank is loaded into two rings, the circle is larger than the barrel, so that the barrel has an adjustment margin, and then the long drill bit is loaded into the round tube at the front end of the shaft, and the slider is pushed, and the drill bit can be docked with the barrel.

Depending on the position of the drill bit, it is decided to insert the wedge in the direction of the ring inserted into the barrel, and use the wedge to adjust the position of the barrel so that it is aligned with the drill bit.

On the front side of the slide there is also an iron ring, on which a rope is tied, in front of the guide rail of the drilling machine, near the position of the hinge, there is a pulley, the rope is rounded around this pulley and hangs into a large pit on the bottom surface, the front end of the rope is tied with an iron block, the weight of the iron block will pull the slider forward, so that the barrel holds up the drill bit.

Workers only need to stand at the front end of the drilling machine and rotate the winch to drive the drill bit to rotate, and they can complete the barrel drilling that used to require the cooperation of two people, and greatly reduce the labor intensity and greatly improve the labor efficiency.

Moreover, because the jacking force of the drill bit and the barrel is controlled by the falling stone, that is, this force can be controlled by adjusting the size of the stone, unlike when the two cooperate, the jacking force is all controlled by human hands, and cannot be kept stable, and the controllable clamping force means that the state is more stable when drilling, and it is less likely to damage the drill bit.

Damaged drill bits are not worth much, the most important thing is that the drill bit that is broken in the barrel is difficult to take out, sometimes it takes a long time to take a drill bit, if it cannot be removed, then the barrel that has taken a lot of effort to process can only be scrapped from ......

This drilling machine not only greatly improves the efficiency of barrel reaming, but also saves nearly half of the labor cost of barrel processing.

The emergence of the drilling machine suddenly broke through the bottleneck of arquebus production, and increased the production efficiency of arquebus by seven or eight times.

It is said that with the drilling machine, the production problem of arquebuses has been basically solved, and mass production can be carried out.

But Chen Xian encountered a new problem.

That is the contradiction between the weight and power of the musket.

It is known that the power of an arquebus depends on the amount of charge and caliber.

The charge is not increased randomly, it is closely related to the strength of the barrel.

To increase the charge of the arquebus, it is necessary to increase the strength of the barrel, and for the level of craftsmanship of this era, the only way to increase the strength of the barrel is to increase the thickness of the barrel wall.

Either to increase the thickness of the barrel, or to increase the caliber, the weight of the barrel increases.

The first arquebuses copied by Chen Xian were copied according to the specifications of the early Spanish Mushcot arquebuses.

This arquebus, with a caliber of up to twenty-two millimeters, weighs about eleven kilograms for the whole gun, and weighs up to fifty grams for a projectile!

The power of this gun was very great, and in the test, the clay figurines covered with two layers of three-millimeter steel plates in the front and back were blown to pieces, and it was simply a small cannon.

But he was too heavy, eleven kilograms, and ordinary people had a hard time even holding it.

You must know that most of Chen Xian's subordinates are underage children, and a few who are a little older are from extremely poor backgrounds and have slightly better family conditions, and they got married at the age of sixteen or seventeen, and it is impossible to come to Chen Xian as an apprentice, so these older ones are somewhat malnourished, and they can't control such heavy muskets at all.

Chen Xian could only find a way to lose weight for the arquebus.

Instead of being cylindrical, the Mushkot barrel is hexagonal, which makes it easier to attach the barrel to a wooden bed of fire.

However, the hexagonal barrel results in varying wall thicknesses.

The bucket theory lets us know that the overall strength of the barrel depends on the weakest point on the barrel.

In order to reduce weight without weakening the strength of the barrel, Chen Xian changed the shape of the barrel to a circle, and forged the tail end of the bolt that blocked the back hole of the barrel into a transverse piece to help fix the barrel on the gun bed.

Such an improvement has reduced the weight of the barrel a lot, but this is still not enough.

The wall thickness of the barrel of the Mushkot arquebus was also four to five millimeters at the thinnest point, which made the musket very powerful and greatly increased the weight of the musket.

After testing, Chen Xian reduced the caliber of the musket to 15 millimeters, and the wall thickness to 4 millimeters.

After some weight reduction, the weight of the arquebus has dropped to almost seven kilograms.

The weight of seven kilograms is still too heavy for the young soldiers under Chen Xian.

This weight still couldn't satisfy Chen Xian, so he made another important improvement to the barrel.

Chen Xian retained the four-millimeter wall thickness at the rear end of the barrel, but reduced the wall thickness at the front end of the barrel to two millimeters.

In other words, Chen Xian designed the barrel to be thin in the front and thick in the back.

This design is based on Chen Xian's analysis of the process of firing a musket.

The maximum pressure inside the musket is when the gunpowder has just been ignited, the chemical reaction occurs rapidly, the gas expands rapidly, and the bullet has not yet been pushed.

As the bullet is pushed, the space of the gas produced by the gunpowder reaction will gradually increase, and as the space increases, the pressure of the gas will naturally decrease, until the bullet is withdrawn from the barrel, the high-pressure gas completely rushes out of the barrel, and the air pressure in the chamber quickly returns to normal.

In this process, the pressure on the rear end of the barrel is undoubtedly the greatest, and the further you go to the front of the barrel, the less pressure there is.

The graded barrel design is in line with this change in pressure.

Such a design not only ensures the strength of the barrel, but also reduces the weight of the barrel.

After this improvement, the weight of the barrel was controlled to more than three kilograms, and the weight of the whole gun was also controlled to five to six kilograms, which was enough for the young apprentices under Chen Xian.

Such a taper design makes the barrel a lot more difficult, but it is not impossible to solve it.

The solution is actually very simple, when rolling the barrel, you only need to use the same taper steel bar as the inner mold of the rolled barrel, and you can roll out the natural taper barrel blank.

After the tapered barrel blank has undergone the reaming process, the inner hole with taper will be processed into a round hole with the same diameter before and after the reaming process, and the outer diameter will be polished by a file to retain its taper, naturally forming a barrel with a gradient wall thickness.