In addition to manufacturing all kinds of armor and mandarin duck battle jackets, the armor workshop is also responsible for the production of helmets for the imperial soldiers, and there are many types of helmets in the Ming army. Pen @ fun @ pavilion wWw. ｂｉｑUｇE。 ｉｎｆｏ

The reason is very simple, the eight-petal hat iron tip helmet has a wider outer edge, and it is better to resist bows and arrows than the phoenix wing helmet. Sergeants use this kind of helmet in combat, and in close combat, the sword and shield hands of each team can protect the close range of the Qing soldiers, and the throwing of the Qing soldiers has an eight-petal hat and an iron-pointed helmet, which can also protect the head well.

Out of the armor workshop, Zhu Youhua went to the musket workshop again, the musket workshop is the workshop with the largest number of craftsmen, with more than 1,000 military craftsmen and apprentices.

According to the technology of the Ming Dynasty, it is not easy to make the bird's gun, and the top is only the part of the barrel drilled, and this process alone takes a month. If you consider other processes such as barrel forging, engagement, and trigger assembly, it takes about two months to build a bird's gun. Of course, there are more than 1,000 people, and if you specialize in making bird guns, there is no problem with a monthly output of 100 strokes, but the process of a batch will take at least a month.

Zhu Youhua knew that the reason why the Ming army's bird guns were often damaged was that the materials were insufficient, or the craftsmen were clever in manufacturing, and the thickness was uneven, especially in the welding of the guns, and many craftsmen lacked skills, which caused the bird guns to be easily fried and bored.

However, there are no such problems in this newly established military workshop in Nanjing, and the craftsmen Zhu Youhua is fully fed and paid, and the raw materials are also tried to satisfy, and they always go to the workshop to inspect the production, sampling inspection, if the craftsmen still dare to steal and play tricks, it is really with their own lives.

However, although the quality has risen, the output is still a little low, first, subject to the number of qualified gunsmiths, most of the gunsmiths in the southern provinces have come to the Nanjing Arsenal, and the total number of gunsmiths has not exceeded 1,000. The second is that it is subject to qualified iron materials, swords, guns, and armor are inseparable from iron, and they all have to be fine iron.

The number of iron materials in the warehouse 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 craftsman's wages and food, 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 low.

In addition, the firepower of the bird gun is not as good as the turtledove, the firing speed is not as good as the flint gun, the turtledove gun needless to say, many Portuguese gunsmiths from Macao know the manufacturing process, under their teaching, the gunsmiths in the arsenal have been trying their best to imitate, it is expected to produce more than 50 rods per month, this is because the gunsmith process is not familiar with the reason, and so the process is familiar, the output will be doubled.

As for flint guns, there are probably two types of flint guns that have appeared in the West at this time: rotary flint guns and percussive flint guns.

Rotary flint guns appeared around the mid-to-late 16th century, using gear strips rubbing flint to ignite gunpowder. The flint lance, which appeared in the early to mid-17th century, was ignited by a hammer striking the flint, and became very popular for the next few hundred years. Zhu Youhua naturally wants to have such a sharp weapon. It's just that although some of the hired Portuguese gunsmiths have heard of this kind of firearm, no one knows the specific manufacturing process for the time being, which is a pity! Even in the West, it has just been developed, and its performance is still very unstable, and the rate of mute fire is large, because of these shortcomings, there is no large number of troops for the time being.

In order to develop a flintstone gun with stable performance as soon as possible, Zhu Youhua specially set up an ordnance research institute, which was subordinate to the Ministry of Industry, and pulled in those Portuguese gunsmiths, gunsmiths, missionaries who were proficient in Yi and Chinese, as well as military craftsmen who were proficient in making guns and cannons in the Daming craftsman's household, and were responsible for the production of firearms while discussing and researching. The required funds are all allocated first, and the treatment is also leveraged, there are salaries, and even grades, although they are all some eight or nine low ranks, those who were once at the bottom of the society, full of the warmth and coldness of the world, the military craftsmen are still very excited, and the enthusiasm for the research and development of firearms is very high, and they can't wait to get it out overnight, in order to repay the emperor's courtesy.

Adjacent to the gun shop is the gun shop.

Casting cannons is a technical job, and most of the military craftsmen in the southern provinces who can cast cannons are concentrated in Foshan Weili, and now many of them have been summoned to the southern capital, plus some Western missionaries who know how to cast cannons and Portuguese hired gunsmiths.

The work of casting cannons was finally organized, and Zhu Youhua transferred them all to the cannon workshop to cast cannons, and the Western missionary Bi Fangji was responsible for communication and scheduling.

The types of cast cannons are mainly medium-sized Furlong field guns and small Tiger squat guns, and a small number of large-caliber Hongyi cannons are cast. The Hongyi cannon is expensive, the rate of fire is slow, the reloading is slow, the steering is slow, it is difficult to form dense vitality, the killing effect on men and horses is limited, the effect of defending the city and field combat is not good, and it has some use when attacking the city, so there is no need to treat the Hongyi cannon as a standard artillery.

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

Fortunately, Zhu Youhua is familiar with the history of the Ming and Qing dynasties, and is not unfamiliar with 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".