With the wire drawing machine, there is no technical bottleneck in the manufacture of chain mail.

For the ancient chain mail manufacturing technology, Chen Xian, who himself made money by restoring ancient armor, was of course very familiar with it.

The manufacture of chain mail, except for the trouble of drawing and weaving, basically has no technical difficulty.

The traditional chain mail process production is divided into: wire drawing, wire winding, cutting, diameter reduction, flattening, punching, weaving and riveting.

Wire drawing is the drawing of iron wire.

Wire wrapping, the drawn wire is wound around an iron rod of fixed diameter.

Cutting, using a chisel to cut the wire wrapped in a spiral shape around the iron rod along a straight line, forming many small iron rings with a spiral shape.

In the process of the iron ring being forcibly squeezed through the round hole, the diameter of the iron ring will be squeezed and contracted by the inner wall of the round hole, and the diameter will become smaller, and the iron ring joints will overlap each other because of the smaller diameter.

Flattening, using a special small tool to flatten the overlap of the iron ring joints to form an extended riveting surface.

Punch a hole, use special pliers, and "bite" a small round hole for riveting on the riveting surface of the overlapping iron rings.

Braiding and riveting, the processed ring rings are connected in series with each other in the order required, and a small iron nail is used to pass through the small round hole on the riveting surface to rivet the ring joints with each other.

Among these processes, the most technically difficult is wire drawing, and the largest labor cost is weaving and riveting.

The reason why Chen Xian recruited so many female apprentices was, of course, to balance the genders, and on the other hand, these female apprentices were the labor force that Chen Xian was going to use to weave the armor and chain mail.

The principle of the wire drawing machine is not complicated, it is a process means to achieve the purpose of shrinking the outer diameter of the iron bar by forcibly pulling the thick iron bar through the horn hole with high-strength material many times.

In this era, there are three problems that need to be solved by wire drawing.

The first is the problem of power, the force required for wire drawing is larger, and if you rely on manpower, the efficiency is difficult to guarantee.

The second problem is to solve the strength problem of the wire drawing plate, which is the easiest, and the cast pig iron template can meet the wire drawing requirements of wrought iron.

The third problem is that after many times of wire drawing, the hardness of the wire becomes larger, the difficulty of wire drawing becomes greater, and it is easy to break.

The third problem has long plagued the drawing process in ancient China, to solve this problem, it is necessary to anneal the wire after many times of wire drawing to eliminate the internal stress caused by wire drawing.

In order to solve the power problem, Chen Xian designed a set of hinge mechanism, he used iron rods, iron plates, rivets, and screws to make a chain similar to a soft ladder, and then wound this chain around two cast iron gears.

Two gears, one driven by the shaft of the water turbine and the other mounted on an iron frame buried deep underground, are slowly rotated by the chain and driven by the driving wheel driven by the water wheel.

Chen Xian buried the iron frame of the wire drawing machine and fixed it behind the driven wheel, when working, the wire head was clamped on the clamp at one end of an iron chain through the wire drawing hole, and an iron hook was installed at the other end of the iron chain, when the wire was drawn, the iron hook was hooked on the chain crossbar, and with the movement of the chain, the chain crossbar pulled the iron chain, and the iron chain produced a pulling force on the iron wire, so as to complete the wire drawing.

The disadvantage of this device is that it can only pull out about five meters of iron wire at a time, and no matter how long it is, it will exceed the working stroke of the chain.

However, the advantage of this device is that it can pull multiple wires at the same time, and the efficiency is much stronger than that of human or animal power hinges.

Such a wire drawing machine, working day and night, can almost supply hundreds of workers at the same time to produce raw materials for chain mail.

In addition to the wire drawing machine, Chen Xian also improved the traditional chain mail production process.

In order to speed up the efficiency of silk winding, he made a winch wire winding machine.

This wire winding machine is actually also a wire drawing machine, and the iron wire processed by the hydraulic wire drawing machine will be drawn in a small amount for the last time on this wire winding machine.

The iron wire passes through the wire drawing hole on one side of the machine, is fixed in the round hole on a steel round bar that is very close to the wire drawing hole, one end of the steel bar is fixed on a lead screw, the lead screw passes through a thick iron plate with threads, is connected with the winch, rotates the winch, drives the lead screw, the lead screw drives the steel rod to do rotary motion at the same time, and also does forward linear motion with the rotation of the thread, at this time, the iron wire that is fixed on the steel rod at one end will be evenly spirally wound on the steel rod with the rotation of the steel rod.

Each time a steel rod is wrapped, the steel rod can be removed and a new one can be installed to continue the operation.

The steel rod wrapped with iron wire is transferred to the next process, and a special cutting worker uses a chisel to cut the iron wire wound on the steel rod to obtain small iron rings.

Chen Xian also optimized several traditional processes of diameter reduction, flattening and punching.

For example, he added a lever principle downward pressure mechanism on the traditional cast iron shrinkage hole cylindrical table, through the lever principle, so that the shrinkage hole table that could only process one ring at a time can be processed at the same time by using the lever principle, and the efficiency has been improved several times in the case of two people's cooperation.

He also expanded the original simple flattening tool into a workbench, the worker sat in front of the workbench, and put the ring with tweezers into the workbench less than one foot away from the eye for processing, and the power of beating the ring was provided by the foot pedal linkage mechanism, because two rings can be processed at the same time, and the eye is close to the work table, so both the processing efficiency and processing quality have been improved.

For the punching process, Chen Xian enlarged the punching pliers, fixed them on the workbench, and used two people to cooperate in processing, one person used tweezers to clamp the ring into the jaws of the punching pliers, and the other person used the lever principle to control the punching pliers to press down to provide power, in order to improve efficiency, Chen Xiancai adopted a double-port design for the punching pliers, and two rings could be processed at the same time.

In terms of weaving, Chen Xian designed a working bench and a simple riveting machine, which can prop up and hang the woven chain mail fabric, and the hanging chain mail fabric can be easily moved to the working mouth of the riveting machine.

The riveting machine also adopts a pliers-like shape, using the lever principle to provide the force required for riveting.

The bench is operated by two people, one who operates the suspended bench and mounts the rivets, and the other who provides the riveting power.

After this series of improvements, the production efficiency of traditional chain mail has increased by five or six times.

With chain mail as a lining, Chen Xian can design the armor more concisely.

Combined with chain mail, and the new type of armor with a hinge structure at some joints, it is lighter and more flexible to wear, but the defense power is not reduced.

After Chen Xian tried the sample, he decided to export all the armor he had produced before, and this new type of armor was not sold for his own use.

In Xiangshuizhuang, in addition to the new wire drawing machine workshop, there is another thing that no one knows.