The rifle workshop now produces 200 rifles a month, and by early April, Li Zhi had 3,200 Mini rifles to equip his troops. Pen @ fun @ pavilion wWw. ｂｉｑUｇE。 ｉｎｆｏ

The 2,000 veterans of the Election Regiment have their own special rifles, train with their own rifles every day, and maintain their own rifles. The rifles of the soldiers of the Broken Regiment have not yet been fully produced, so they can only train with rifles in turns. On weekdays, the soldiers of the Broken Regiment carry wooden sticks to simulate a rifle training queue. More than 1,000 rifles were placed on the shooting range for the soldiers of the Broken Regiment, who took turns to practice target shooting. The soldiers of the Broken Regiment shot 12 shots twice a week, and each of them fired 300 shots in three months.

Musketeers have the advantage of being quick to form an army compared to traditional warriors. The soldiers of the Broken Regiment, who fired 300 rounds of ammunition, were basically able to hit a humanoid target 200 meters away when they hit the target, and they could become an army after a few months of training.

The Mini rifle has the trouble of hanging lead: after the rifling of the lead bullet and the rifle is rubbed for a long time, the lead on the edge of the bullet will adsorb on the rifling and cause the rifling to fail. Therefore, after each rifle has been fired for 200 rounds, it must be taken to the rifle workshop to clean up the lead, and the gunsmiths can use a drawing bed to pull out the lead attached to the rifling.

Fortunately, the lead is soft, and it is quick to clean the hanging lead with a steel broach, and the gunsmiths can clean twenty rifles a day.

The Minny rifle uses softer lead bullets, and the life of the barrel is about 1,000 rounds. Only the first batch of 125 rifles, which fired more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition at the time of the extermination of the mountain, were scrapped.

There are few scrapped guns, and the number of rifles currently available is increasing at a rate of two hundred per month. Within a few months, all the soldiers of the Broken Regiment would be able to have their own rifles.

However, for Li Zhi, such a production speed is still too slow. In preparation for a rainy day, Li Zhi sent people to various prefectures and counties in Gyeonggi to recruit craftsmen and ordinary blacksmiths who could make bird guns.

The people sent out by Li Zhi were headed by Zheng Hui. Zheng Hui is the grandson of Li Zhi's grandfather's younger brother, and is Li Zhi's cousin, who is shrewd and calm, originally worked as a manager in a textile workshop, and now Li Zhi transferred him to the official hall as the head of the officials, that is, the secretary. On weekdays, Li Zhi asked Zheng Hui to handle the clerical chores of the official hall.

This time, Zheng Hui recruited gunsmith apprentices, Li Zhi gave each person two taels of monthly money, and then ten taels of moving expenses per person, so that they could rent a villa built by Li Zhi in Fanjiazhuang. After being an apprentice for a period of time, he was rewarded with seven silver coins for each rifle produced.

The high salary given by Li Zhi attracted many artisan households, and the recruiters basically attracted all the local artisans to the job fair site every time they went to the job fair, and the scene was very enthusiastic. The recruiters walked six prefectures and counties to complete Li Zhi's recruitment target. If Li Zhi hadn't emphasized the need for interviews and asked the officials to recruit only honest craftsmen, I'm afraid that more than 1,000 craftsmen from the six prefectures and counties would have poured into Fanjiazhuang.

In the end, Li Zhi ushered in more than 80 gunsmiths and more than 210 blacksmiths, a total of 300 people, and asked all these blacksmiths to move to Fanjiazhuang to become gunsmith apprentices

Of course, in order to keep it a secret, Li Zhi did not tell the secret of rifling to the new gunsmith apprentices. The apprentice gunsmiths only learned to make smoothbore flintlock pistols with thicker walls, and after completing various inspections according to the rules, they handed over the finished smoothbore pistols to the old gunsmiths to draw rifling.

By concentrating the rifling drawing work on the old gunsmith, Li Zhi's secrecy work would be much easier.

The accuracy of the manual era cannot be guaranteed, and there are always some differences in the caliber of the guns made by different gunsmiths, but this does not affect the operation of the broaching machine rifling. Li Zhi's broaching machine is very flexible, if the chamber is one millimeter wider, only need to put an extra layer of thick paper under the broach to raise the broach, and vice versa.

Li Zhi gave the old gunsmith an average of four taels a month, and the secrecy requirements for them were also very strict. Li Zhi personally told these gunsmiths that if anyone leaked the secret of rifling to the outside, the leaker would be shot directly.

The ruthless gunsmiths who are honest adults know that the nine thieves of the glass workshop have been killed. No one wants to abandon the good life of Fanjiazhuang and risk their lives to sell the secret of rifling.

The new apprentices do not participate in the drawing of rifling, do not involve the secrecy of the Minnie rifle, and naturally earn no more than the old gunsmiths.

After the new 200 gunsmiths were recruited, they were paid two taels a month during the apprenticeship, and after they finished their studies, they made rifles without rifling, and they were rewarded with one tael for each rifling they made. Of course, three of the two silver bonuses were given to the craftsman's master, and only seven were to the apprentice. But in any case, the monthly income of 227 Qian is also very considerable.

You must know that Li Zhi also includes three meals a day for gunsmiths and apprentices.

Among these new apprentices, the craftsman who knew how to make a bird gun began to learn to make smoothbore flintlock pistols in Fanjiazhuang, and a month later began to independently produce rifled rifles. The blacksmiths, who did not know how to make birds, did not immediately learn to make flintlock pistols when they arrived in Fanjiazhuang, but were organized to make bayonets for the existing Minnie rifles.

Li Zhi had to equip the musketeers with bayonets.

Li Zhi's troops consisted only of musketeers, no pikemen or sword and shield soldiers to protect the musketeers, and once they made close contact, they relied entirely on hand-to-hand combat with musketeers. Previously, Li Zhi equipped each musketeer with a long knife, but it was obvious that the long knife was not lethal to the cavalry, and it was not conducive to the musketeer's morale in the face of the cavalry.

Li Zhi decided to follow the example of later generations and add a detachable bayonet to the Minny rifle as a cold weapon for musketeers.

The bayonet designed by Li Zhi has a blade of 50 centimeters long, with the blade below and serrated teeth engraved on the back of the knife. The bayonet can be stabbed or slashed, and once it penetrates into the enemy's body, the serrated teeth will tear the flesh and skin, making it extremely difficult for the wound to heal. There was also a handle behind the blade of the bayonet, twenty centimeters long, which allowed the bayonet to be used as a one-handed short knife out of the rifle.

The bayonet was mounted on a wooden holder under the barrel. The wooden holder of the rifle was attached to an iron rod with concave and convex teeth, and a hole was made in the tail of the handle of the bayonet, which was designed to match the iron rod. When loading the bayonet, the hole in the bottom of the bayonet is inserted into the iron rod on the wooden support, and after the end is put on the bottom, it is rotated 90 degrees, and then pressed down and turned 90 degrees again, and the bayonet is fixed on the rifle.

Later, when the infantry or cavalry armed with long weapons rushed towards the musketeers, the musketeers loaded their bayonets after shooting. With bayonets, the musketeers had long weapons that could be used against the enemy's infantry, and even cavalry could be used to challenge them, which was of great significance for raising the morale of the musketeers.

In order to make bayonets, Li Zhi bought several thousand catties of Sugang from the ironware merchants of the Tian0jin Acropolis and provided them to the blacksmiths. Sugang is an iron smelting technology of the Ming Dynasty, which is an improvement of the steel filling method. During the production of Suzhou Iron and Steel, the oxygen in the "wrought iron" is used to oxidize the silicon, manganese and carbon in the pig iron, so as to remove the inclusions, and the quality of the steel produced is good.

More than 200 apprentice gunsmiths did not learn to make guns, but built stoves to make tools in the newly opened blacksmith workshop area in the south of the city, and beat them day and night to make bayonets for the soldiers of the Elective Regiment and the Breaking Regiment.