The quantity of iron in the treasury of the Ministry of Industry is limited, a qualified bird gun, at least six catties of refined iron must be consumed, and forty catties of wool iron can be smelted to seven or eight catties of refined iron, plus the price of iron, the price of charcoal, the wages and food of craftsmen, and other expenses, etc., the cost of a bird gun is between four and five taels, not only consumes more iron, but the cost is not small. Pen @ fun @ pavilion wWw. ｂｉｑUｇE。 ｉｎｆｏ

Looking at the process of building the bird gun, Zhu Youlang suddenly remembered something, and he said: "By the way, in addition to the bird gun ignited by the fire rope, can Ding Lao make that kind of rotating fire gun or fire fire gun?" ”

Zhu Youlang roughly described the two kinds of firearms he mentioned, and he was talking about the historical rotary flint gun and the striking flint gun.

The revolver flint appeared around the mid-to-late 16th century, and ignited gunpowder by rubbing a gear bar against flint. The flint spear, which appeared in the early to mid-17th century, was ignited by a hammer striking a flint and became very popular for the next few hundred years. Zhu Youlang naturally wants to have such a sharp weapon.

Ding San thought about it for a long time, although he wondered how the emperor could think of such a bird, but he finally shook his head and said, "I'm ashamed, the kind of firearm that Your Majesty said, Wei Chen really doesn't know that he has never heard of it. ”

Zhu Youlang nodded, Ding San is not a skilled firearms talent, and it is normal that he has never heard of flint guns, and besides, qualified flint guns are not so easy to make, so he is anxious.

Adjacent to the Gun Workshop is the Gun Workshop.

Casting cannons is a technical job, most of the hereditary military craftsmen in the two Guangxi will cast cannons concentrated in Foshan Weili, Foshan is in the hands of Li Chengdong of the Qing army, and the gunsmiths inside have already been served by a pot, so there is a great lack of artillery casting talents in the capital.

Pang Tianshou, the head of the Imperial Horse Supervisor, suggested that Zhu Youlang buy some Hongyi cannons from Macao to help out, but Zhu Youlang vetoed: "The Hongyi cannon is often hundreds of taels of silver, and even some heavy cannons are as high as thousands of taels of silver, the money to buy a Hongyi cannon, the Ming Dynasty can make a hundred Franc machine medium cannons, the Hongyi cannon is big and useless, and the heavy money to buy heavy artillery from the Hongmao Fan, if you make more small cannons, you can also save a batch of money and grain, and the household money and food are not abundant!" ”

Pang Tianshou's suggestion reflects the mainstream thinking of the Ming Dynasty, and there has been a craze for buying Hongyi cannons from foreigners at the end of the Ming Dynasty, from Hongyi small cannons to cannons, the price ranges from at least 100 taels to thousands of taels, and even bought a Hongyi bronze cannon weighing 7,000 catties, and the cannonball alone weighs 23 catties.

Xu Guangqi and Hong Chengchou once ordered a large number of Hongyi cannons weighing ten catties from Westerners, and the price of each one was 1,000 taels of silver, and Zhu Youlang estimated that the cost was only more than 100 taels, and the profit was too high, and a Hongyi heavy cannon cost thousands of taels of silver. If the Ming Dynasty makes its own products, it can build at least one or two hundred tiger squatting cannons, and the red-haired fan is to slaughter the Ming Dynasty as a pig.

In Zhu Youlang's view, the idea of using firearms in the late Ming Dynasty had been wrong, the Hongyi cannon was expensive, the rate of fire was slow, the loading was slow, the steering was slow, it was difficult to form dense vitality, the killing effect on men and horses was limited, the effect of defending the city and field warfare was not good, and there was still some use in the siege of the city, so there was no need to treat the Hongyi cannon as a standard artillery.

The current situation of the Ming Dynasty. Zhu Youlang was more optimistic about the Ming army's previous vehicle-mounted light artillery flow. The car battalion formed a field battle, and the medium and long-range were dominated by light Fran machines with fast rate of fire and small tiger squat guns that fired shotguns; Supplemented by firearms such as turtledove foot guns (similar to the late Qing Dynasty), bird guns, hundreds of tigers running arrows and a swarm of bees, with foot soldiers stabbing out from the gap between the car formations, and finally the cavalry cooperated with the pursuit of the remnants of the enemy, which was a good strategy for field warfare.

Therefore, self-made artillery is king!

Fortunately, there were some Western missionaries who knew how to cast cannons half a year ago, and there were also a few Portuguese mercenaries who knew how to cast cannons. Zhu Youlang transferred them all to the cannon workshop to cast cannons, and Pang Tianshou, the head of the Imperial Horse Supervisor, was responsible for communication and scheduling.

The types of cast cannons are mainly medium-sized Furlong machine guns and small Tiger squat guns, and a small number of large-caliber Hongyi cannons are cast.

Judging from the current scale of the cannon workshop, under normal circumstances, it is possible to cast about three or four Franc machines per month on average, seven or eight tiger squat cannons, and it is estimated that it takes an average of two or three months to cast one or two Hongyi cannons like eight pounds and ten pounds. The efficiency was too low to meet the demand for artillery in the army.

So Zhu Youlang relied on the insight of his previous life to teach the gunsmiths in the cannon workshop a method to increase the speed of cannon casting.

That is the iron mold casting method of Gong Zhenlin, an artillery expert in the late Qing Dynasty!

In the Ming Dynasty, more copper cannons were cast, and the wood clay fan casting cannon was used, and the process was cumbersome, and at the end of the Ming Dynasty and the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, the copper and iron cannons were available, and the iron cannon was used to cast the clay cannon, and the specific technique was the lost wax method, that is, the wax was used to make the cannon mold first, and then the mud seal was made into a clay fan. After the mud fan is dry, melt the wax inside, pour in molten iron, and break the mud fan after cooling.

Choosing mud and mixing mud is a science, and the mud should not be too coarse, and it will easily disintegrate if it is too coarse. If it is too fine, the water vapor will not be permeable, not only the mud fan will dry slowly, but there will also be more bubbles after pouring molten iron.

Ganfan is the most fatal, and this is what worries the gunsmith the most. It's not a simple matter to let the mud dry, the mud fan should be evenly dried inside and outside, the most easy bad thing is that the outside is too fast, and the inside is not enough, so the mud fan is ventilated and dry.

If it is a cannon of several thousand catties, it will take three or four months to dry the mold alone, and at least two or three months in the north. If it's just a small cannon, you should be able to do it for more than a month in the spring and autumn in the north, and you have to run for more than two months in winter. The casting cycle is very long, and the scrap rate is very high, casting ten often have to scrap seven or eight, and there is almost no one in ten qualified finished products.

During the Opium War, Guan Tianpei, the commander of the Guangdong Naval Division, inspected the military defense of the Humen Fort, and found that there were many artillery pieces that were unusable, and one of the guns actually had a big pit in the chamber of "four bowls of water storage".

The one who can really solve this problem well is Gong Zhenlin, an artillery expert in the late Qing Dynasty.

Gong Zhenlin's iron mold casting method is to first make a mud cannon out of mud, and decompose the mud cannon into four to seven sections, each section is divided into two petals, left and right. Then correspond to each petal, make an outer fan with mud, leave a handle on the outer fan, and there are bamboo shoots that can connect each petal together. Then the molten iron is poured into the inner and outer clay of each petal, and the iron fan of this petal is made.

Next, cast the cannon, fasten the iron fan together with bamboo shoots, fix it with an iron hoop on the outside, brush the inner layer with a slurry to prevent adhesion, and then insert the gun core, pour the molten iron into it, and when it is cooled and formed, the outer flaps of the iron fan are peeled off piece by piece, and the surface is polished and trimmed while the gun body is hot. After that, the mud core is cleaned and the inner chamber is rotated to form. As long as the iron mold is made, the cost of making a cannon will be greatly reduced, according to Gong Zhenlin's calculations, the artillery silver for casting a thousand catties of cannons will cost a hundred taels for one piece, and the iron mold will only cost a few taels. According to Gong Zhenlin's account in "The Diagram of Casting Cannon Iron Mold", forty gunners, if they are in a hurry, can build nine cannons in two days, which is still a thousand-pound cannon.

The biggest change in Gong Zhenlin's iron mold casting method is to speed up the casting of artillery, improve the product qualification rate, and reduce the cost. Although in terms of artillery quality, there is actually no qualitative improvement, but it is already very good for Zhu Youlang, and what Daming lacks most now is time!

After those gunsmiths used the casting method provided by Zhu Youlang, the speed of casting cannons was really greatly improved, and the original average of only three or four Furang machine guns could be cast per month, after using the iron film casting method, fifteen or sixteen guns could be cast per month, and the output of tiger squat guns also increased from seven or eight to thirty or forty guns per month.

Zhu Youlang watched while walking, shuttling through the workshops, and the craftsmen and apprentices in the workshops were all in full swing doing their work. They transport iron materials, forging forging, washing finished products, everything is in order and in an orderly manner.

In the midst of a busy situation, everyone is working very hard, and in this year, there are not many places where they can eat and live, and they can't be driven away because they don't work hard.

The apprentices ate hot noodles with white rice every day, could eat enough at every meal, and ate meat every three days, which made them very grateful, and many of them were from homeless backgrounds, and when they wandered around, they had seen too much of the world and their senses were becoming numb, but here, for the first time, they felt the warmth of life.

But there are also some treacherous ones, although they have strength, they are relatively lazy, always grinding foreign workers and cutting corners. Zhu Youlang will not be polite to these people, and when he found out that one of them was a mess, he was beaten with a stick, and then drove out of the weapons workshop and let himself destruct.

He took his personal guard, and walked through the corridors and aisles with great interest, watching the arsenal of the Ming Center be established little by little in his hands, and his heart was quite excited, and he pointed out the surrounding ordnance from time to time.

Zhu Youlang turned around and said: "In the future, the safety of firearms and gunpowder workshop craftsmen is the first, during the test, the relevant people stay in a safe place, the operator is covered with iron armor, and the repeated tests are hundreds of times, we must find out the potential safety hazards, the operation must have rules to follow, and you will have less literacy and hyphenation, and you must know Braille in the future, and you must exchange more experience with each other, engage in process improvement, and make standardization, and you can't rely on experience alone to do things in the future.

Of course, the food and wages of ordinary military craftsmen are also not less, and every time they make a qualified bird gun, cannon, armor, and waist knife. The imperial court will give certain rewards. However, there is a reward and a punishment, and if the weapons produced in the future are unqualified, the relevant people will have to deduct the monthly salary and monthly food to replenish the material loss, and if there is any injury to the sergeant, it will be severely punished. ”

"We will obey the commandments."

Under the kowtow of Ding San and other craftsmen, Zhu Youlang slowly stepped out of the weapons workshop.

ps1: Dear book friends, try not to use bonus coins for subscribing chapters, increase the coin subscription author can't get a penny, the background does not show the subscription, and it is estimated that at least one-tenth of each chapter is subscribed to the coin gift, what a pit.

ps2: Recommend an author's friend's new book Kuang Fu Daming, which is also the theme of the late Ming Dynasty, and interested book friends can take a look. (To be continued.) )