Black powder has already produced 500 catties, and Wu Yanzhi decided to temporarily stop production. This is mainly due to the relatively remote area of Raozhou, which is difficult to buy saltpeter and sulfur, and the cost is too high to be cost-effective. In the future, it will be too late to return to Luoyang to make gunpowder.

The most critical thing now is the development of muskets. Since Wu Yanzhi will not stay here for a long time, there is no time, energy, and manpower to make artillery here.

And that thing is too bulky, and it will be difficult to transport it back to Luoyang next year. Therefore, the development of muskets can only be accelerated.

On the morning of the second day after recruiting guards, Wu Yanzhi took Qi Xuan to check the manufacturing progress of the musket.

When I entered the courtyard that I had rented for a few officials, I heard the sound of grinding steel. When I entered the room, I saw that Yao Kuan was polishing and expanding the two barrels with a few people who were developing firearms.

Wu Yanzhi also became a gun enthusiast by chance because of his study of metallurgy, and he also knew a little about the principles of ordinary instruments.

The muzzle velocity of a bullet has a lot to do with the length of the barrel, and the muzzle velocity of a long barrel will be very fast. However, as soon as the barrel grows, the weight directly increases, and it is more difficult to carry.

Seeing Wu Yanzhi and Qi Xuan coming in, several of them stopped to salute.

"According to Wu Gong's arrangement, we only made three barrels, and one has been completed so far, but the rifling has not been processed yet!" Yao Kuan went and took the barrel with the trimmed inner diameter.

Wu Yanzhi nodded and took it, feeling that there were at least ten catties, he took a closer look, and felt that the appearance and size were not bad, completely manufactured according to his own design, with a length of two feet and six inches, and an inner diameter of about 8 millimeters.

Since the quality of the steel here is not very good, in order to minimize the chance of exploding, the barrel is designed to be relatively thick, about 8 mm, which is about the same as the caliber.

The inner wall has been expanded very evenly with high-strength steel sheets. The so-called high strength means that the carbon content is higher. Wu Yanzhi had already asked them to add charcoal powder and treated the blades with high-temperature charcoal infiltration in the furnace.

In order to reduce the difficulty of design, Wu Yanzhi used the simplest "single-shot rifle". The design of this gun is very simple, almost exactly the same principle as a normal firearm.

The so-called "old-fashioned single-shot rifle" is manually loaded and artificially unloaded, and its rate of fire is roughly 20~25 rounds per minute.

At the back of the barrel is the cartridge groove, and the firing pin is designed on the cover that covers the bullet groove (combination), and the contraction of the firing pin is controlled by the spring, which requires a total of six accessories.

Here, the firing pin on the lid of the magazine is critical, and it needs to be designed with the right amount of force, both to be able to fire with the trigger and to be able to return accurately with the spring.

The principle of firing the bullet: moving the bolt to fire the hammer, the hammer strikes the firing pin, and the firing pin fires the bullet primer.

Of course, this old single-shot rifle is not difficult to design and manufacture, and it is much more convenient than semi-automatic, automatic rifles.

Wu Yanzhi is not going to develop any semi-automatic or automatic rifles, because it is completely unnecessary! This single-shot rifle has surpassed this time by more than a thousand years, completely crushing all weapons at this time.

……

"Not bad! Pretty much what I thought! When will the remaining two barrels be machined? He asked.

"It can be done tomorrow! You can start making rifling the day after tomorrow, and you have to ask Wu Gong to guide this rifling, and the villain will not wait! Zhang Cheng said.

"Excellent! This hand-cranked machine you made temporarily looks pretty good! Wu Yanzhi looked at the machine that was expanding the inner hole on the machine tool.

This machine is just a hand-cranked table drill, plus a fixture, in fact, it is a simple machine tool that almost any craftsman can build at a glance.

"This thing is not too complicated, I will wait for four or five days to make it, and I will use it!" Zhang Cheng said.

After looking at the barrel, Wu Yanzhi looked at the bolt, the slot cover, and the firing pin, and found that it had already been completed. He picked it up and tried it, and it worked.

These craftsmen make the most difficult bolt and slot cover firing pins, but they are faster than the barrel, Wu Yanzhi was a little surprised. I thought to myself, it seems that the eight craftsmen who are second to none in this Great Zhou are by no means in vain.

"Did the steel of this bolt be treated as I said?" He asked. Although he had asked for charcoal, he was still not reassured, after all, the steel was not smelted by himself.

"It was repeatedly beaten by the humble position, and it was also re-fired with charcoal according to the requirements of Wu Gong, but I don't know if it's easy to use!" Yao Kuan said.

"That's good, it should be no problem! After you have finished rifling the barrel, hurry up and produce the bullets! A thousand pieces were produced in advance, and the warheads were made of lead; The bullet case is made of copper-tin alloy of four percent copper to reduce costs.

Once I've produced the mine mercury, I'll be able to give it a try! "The Way of Martial Arts. The green alum, a necessary raw material for the manufacture of thunder mercury, had just been purchased back a hundred catties the day before yesterday, and the thunder mercury would have to be refined tomorrow.

……

(Don't look at it)

The production process and principle of firearms for old-fashioned rifles:

Here is a detailed description of the manufacture of the original single-shot rifle, so as not to mistakenly think that many book lovers are thinking how difficult it is and what kind of high-tech thing it is.

This primitive rifle was actually handmade by blacksmiths hundreds of years ago.

Therefore, it is not complicated to make a single-shot vintage rifle, and it is possible to manufacture a qualified vintage rifle by hand in a small workshop.

If you know the process, you can make it, and you can use ancient steel.

Any explosion is nonsense, because after the barrel is produced, it has to be blasted test, and the probability of exploding the chamber is extremely low.

When it comes to making a rifle, let's go into detail by dividing a few steps. Wu Yanzhi has explained this technique in detail to several craftsmen who developed muskets many times.

One, the barrel.

The barrel, of course, is made of steel. However, steel that is too hard will not work, and it is not good to scratch the rifling. Because I can't produce high-strength alloy steel blades for the time being,

Therefore, only mild steel is used as steel pipes, and high-carbon steel blades are used to cut rifling. Speaking of this barrel, it is very time-consuming and laborious to manufacture.

1. Pipe making.

It is to hand-make a piece of steel ingot into a hollow steel pipe. This is done by the blacksmith after the ingots are burned red, hammered into thick sheets, and then continuously hammered and rolled into tubes.

Some might say, why not use mold pouring?

This is a gun, and if the barrel is molded, it is easy to have bubbles and trachoma, and it will really blow up. The quality of the barrel can be guaranteed only by constant thrashing. The best craft at this time is "tempered by a thousand times".

When beating, just put a small steel bar inside! In addition, pulverized coal or charcoal powder is generally added to the joint, which is charcoal. Charburizing is to harden steel!

Because in the continuous smelting and hammering process, the carbon in the steel will react with oxygen partially, resulting in the loss of carbon and the softness of the steel.

When the barrel is formed, the inner wall inside must be of different sizes! This requires the use of a simple manual machine (a simple manual machine, in fact, it is very simple), using a harder steel knife to trim the inner wall of the barrel.

This process is very time-consuming, and it is estimated that it will take four or five times to ensure that the size of the inner wall is consistent! The diameter and rifling are directly related to the trajectory of the bullet.

2. Tick and scrape rifling.

This rifling was also something that existed four or five hundred years ago, and it was also purely handmade at that time, but it was time-consuming, laborious, and troublesome.

Some people may not know what rifling is, simply put, rifling is the spiral rotation of the inner wall of the barrel Yin wire or groove.

Without rifling, the bullet must be smaller than the diameter of the pipe, and after it flies out of the barrel, it will fly randomly, and the trajectory is extremely unstable, and there is no aiming at all.

The earliest smoothbore guns were unrifled. Since there is no rifling, there is a gap between the projectile and the wall of the barrel, and the gas produced by the gunpowder will leak quite a lot, causing the projectile to shoot at a short distance.

The most important thing is that the projectile also does not have a fixed flight path. After the projectile comes out of the barrel, it will fly around, and it will be difficult to hit the target.

With rifling, it was possible to use a bullet slightly larger than the male line on the inner wall of the barrel, and through the huge thrust generated by the explosive gunpowder, the bullet could be forcibly pushed into the barrel.

The material of the warhead is definitely softer than that of the barrel. Since the warhead is larger than the diameter of the tube (male), it will certainly be pressed into the male, which in turn is spiraling, so that the bullet will spin.

Only a rotating bullet will have a fixed trajectory and will not fly around. Therefore, according to the traces of the bullet warhead rubbed by the rifling of the barrel, you can determine which gun it is. The rifling of each gun is different. Even if it is produced by a machine, there will always be a difference.

In this big week, it must be hand-hooked. It is laborious to make rifling, but the technique is actually very simple. A craftsman, in two or three days it is no problem to scrape the rifling of a gun!

After the above two processes are completed, the main process of the barrel is completed. All that's left is the grinding, and then there's the loading part (for reloading).

Second, the bolt.

Since Wu Yanzhi knows how to make steel, and has studied the course "Blasting Engineering", he knows how to make mercury thunderate, so he can directly make a rear-loading rifle with integrated ammunition.

Although this bolt is slightly complicated, it is just a mechanism that uses a spike spring to reset, and it is easy to manufacture if you know the principle.

With him explaining the principle, some of the best craftsmen in the country whom he had selected had developed samples.

There are six or seven parts of the gun, and in order to facilitate processing, all of them need to be made of mild steel, and the bolt holes are softer and better.

Hand threads are also used here. These techniques were strange to the craftsmen at first, but they soon learned how they worked.

3. Bullets.

This thing, it's a bit of a problem, and the most important thing here is the easy-to-fire primer.

Wu Yanzhi has not yet developed thunder mercury.

As mentioned earlier, know the chemical formula and the necessary raw materials. A hundred catties of green alum (alum, saponum, honey locust alum) were just delivered a few days ago, and it is planned that thunder mercury will also be produced soon.

Most of the average firearms enthusiast or interested person understands. The mechanism of the bullet is divided into four parts: the warhead, the propellant, the cartridge case, and the primer.

The firing pin on the bolt strikes the primer at the bottom of the bullet, and because it uses a highly sensitive explosive (such as thundermercury), it will explode when it is struck and ignite the propellant in front.

When the propellant explodes, the resulting gas pressure is so great that it forcibly squeezes the bullet into the barrel. Since the material of the bullet is generally lead, copper, etc., which is softer than the material of the barrel, it will be squeezed into the rifling to prevent gas leakage.

At the same time, it will also follow the spiral trajectory of the rifling, resulting in rotation. The rotating warhead naturally has a stable flight trajectory.