Qi Zu and the others completely withdrew from the woods, and then they squatted down, opened the lid of the wooden box, and then took out a large pistol from inside! That's right, a 100% pistol, that is, it is a little big, the length of the barrel is more than a foot, the diameter is thicker than a thumb, and the wooden body is underneath. Generally speaking, it is similar to a modern pistol, with the only difference being that there are two large trigger-shaped flintlock lighters at the tail of the barrel.

"Is this thing reliable? You see, the left side of my face has been broken, and if the right side is sprayed again, then I may be the first emperor to divorce in the history of the empire. Who would dare to ask me, I can be scared to death when I turn my head when I sleep at night, why don't I try it first? Hong Tao took this gun and began to get sick again. He was afraid that this thing would blow up or burst into flames, and spray himself all over his face.

This kind of thing has not happened before, Qi Zu has made muskets according to the information he gave a few years ago, and when he first started experimenting, he injured slaves, and there were blind ones, and they were smoothbore guns with simpler technology, and now they are directly playing front-loading rifled guns, and the danger is only a lot more.

For the musket weapon, Hong Tao was very interested at first. The Royal Marines are still using the hand crossbow as their main weapon, and although it has been improved for two generations, the hand crossbow is a small crossbow after all, and it is not as big as a musket in terms of shooting distance and power. If the Marines could be equipped with more suitable muskets as weapons, then Hong Tao would be a little more bold, and it would be possible to rely on a few hundred people to land and attack the city.

But after several years of experimentation, the results have not been great, although a few years ago a qualified front-loading smoothbore gun has been created, but the range and accuracy are really not flattering, and the crossbow is not easy to use, and the speed of pure handmade is not fast, there is no advantage. Due to the fact that the mode of battle in Jinhe Bay is mainly focused on the sea. It is rare to attack shore targets, so the attraction of muskets to Hong Tao is not as great as artillery, and it is better to think more about artillery, and then the project was simply stopped.

Unexpectedly, Qi Zu never forgot about this matter, and this time he simply used the opportunity of trial production of rifled guns to get the rifled guns out first. But Hong Tao still didn't catch a cold, mainly because the previous smoothbore gun made him lose confidence. He thought that the muskets made in this era could hardly exceed the power of bows and arrows, and that they were purely chicken. I don't plan to build a large-scale army, so there is no need to bother with this.

"You said that you are not afraid of anyone when you go to the sea, why are you cowardly when your feet touch the ground? These guns have been tested by me, otherwise I wouldn't dare to take them to you, the emperor, to play with. If I blow you up, I won't be alive! Hurry up and try it with two shots......" Qi Zu and Hong Tao still spoke with the same attitude as before, and they didn't take this emperor title in their eyes at all. He is now desperate to get Hong Tao's evaluation, it is useless for others to say anything, only Hong Tao is qualified to say good or bad.

"You're too particular about this bullet. There is no need to add a cork nursery in the back to imitate the appearance of the cannonball, the manufacturing cost is too high, and if we don't wait for the enemy to be wiped out, we ourselves will have to die of poverty first......" Hong Tao still didn't want to try, and began to find fault in other places, anyway, if he could rub it for a while, he would rub it for a while, and if he couldn't keep it, there would be people who didn't have long eyes to rescue him.

"Without this cork tray, the bullet would have fallen out. The seal is also not tight. Qi Zu did not agree with Hong Tao's statement, he felt that he had thought it very comprehensively. As for the cost, that's not something that designers should ponder.

"Look, I'll think of a way for you, it's cheap and easy to use......" Although Hong Tao has never built a front-loading gun, he has played it, among firearms enthusiasts in Canada and the United States. A lot of people have this old-fashioned firearm. It's the same thing as collecting antique cars, not about handling and speed, but about that nostalgic feeling. His solution to the problem of reloading was simple: he shoved lead bullets into the muzzle of a thin piece of wet skin, and then stabbed them to the end with a strip. So. The damp skin will be very astringent, and it will expand slightly, blocking the gap between the bullet and the barrel, so that the bullet cannot fall out, and the skin can also act as a sealing ring to increase the airtightness of the barrel.

"It's as simple as that? I'll try...... Boom! Qi Zu was fooled, he was not sure whether Hong Tao's method would work or not, so he reached out and took the gun, and he first fired at a big tree next to him.

“…… Or do you have the ability, I've found the right person, come and see if this quasi-head can be used! "The shooting effect was very good, and immediately a fist-sized scar appeared on the big tree, and the lead bullet hit the trunk five centimeters deep.

"Put a few more shots...... Boom! "If you are a man, you love guns, and if you are timid, you don't dare to shoot the first shot, which doesn't mean that you don't dare to shoot later. Seeing that Qi Zu was fine, Hong Tao became bold again, took the pistol and looked over and over again, felt that there was no problem, and loaded a bullet himself, aimed at the same position on the tree and fired a shot.

After firing a shot, Hong Tao became addicted, this thing is really fun, just like the trolls used in fighting when I was a child, and the recoil is not too big, mainly because the white smoke is very visual. In addition to being fun, this pistol is indeed relatively accurate, firing ten shots at a big tree from twenty meters away, at least five of which can hit the middle of the tree, three hitting the sides of the tree, and two shots not hitting the target at all. If the light is more accurate, this gun is a little stronger than many automatic pistols of later generations, and the length of the barrel is its advantage.

Qi Zu's wooden box contained not only a pistol, but seven or eight guns of different calibers and lengths, which were all by-products of experimenting with manual broaching machines, which he turned into various guns to play with as a pastime. Among them, the largest caliber is 20 mm, which can no longer be considered a gun, it should be called a hand cannon. The smallest diameter is only 10 mm, and no matter how thin it is, it is not the level that can be achieved by the current process.

These barrels are rolled out of steel plates, and they can't be rolled too thinly, and the caliber is too thin to shoot and inject the medicine into it, and the power of the bullet is not flattering. What Hong Tao liked the most were two 13mm pistols and a 13mm caliber long gun. Their caliber is considered moderate and powerful enough, especially the spear, which can shoot at a distance of 200 meters and shoot 4 out of 10 shots.

After enough shooting addiction, Hong Tao began to be dissatisfied again, the front-loading rifled gun hit far and accurately, but it was too troublesome to load. Whether it is a leather wrap or a cork plug to load, the lead bullet needs to be smashed into the barrel with a small mallet and then stabbed in with a stick. Even if this set of moves is very skillful, the reload speed will not be too high, and one shot a minute is good. In addition, the gun body is a bit heavy, mainly because the barrel is too thick, Hong Tao has never seen how the real gun barrel is made, he wants to observe the scene, see if he can evoke the memory in his head, find out how to improve.

"Take me to see the hand broaching machine and the mold for making bullets, there is room for improvement."

The results of the observation are both happy and worried, so let's talk about the worries first. The barrel is a very cumbersome process, except for the hydraulic hammer, which is basically made by hand. The craftsmen first burned the steel ingots red, then beat them into long strips of sheet steel with a forging hammer, and then burned the steel plates red and rolled them into a steel core by forging. The longer the barrel, the more times it was forged and heated, and the joints had to be welded with charcoal powder and iron powder while rolling. The rolled steel pipe should be polished into a hexagonal shape, which is convenient for post-processing and fixation, and the round steel pipe is difficult to fix, and it is not easy to determine the position.

The next step is to get on the drilling machine, fix the polished steel pipe on the wooden manual drilling machine, drill the inside of the steel pipe several times with a long drill bit, and then put it on the boring machine and use a boring cutter to boring along the drilled pipe wall several times to ensure that the inner wall of the steel pipe is smooth, and then it can be rifled on the manual broaching machine. The broaching machine made by Qi Zu is very simple, that is, the bed body of the steel pipe is fixed, and the splint is used to ensure that the steel pipe is concentric with the broach. The broach is mounted on a wooden worm, and the broach only needs to be pulled backwards, and the broach will run in the steel pipe according to a certain rotation angle, grinding a groove on the pipe wall.

The broache is a small steel bar with teeth made from the hardest steel in the open-hearth steel, which is embedded in the groove of the head of the pull bar. At first, the entire broache was basically buried in the lever, and only a few teeth were exposed. With the formation of rifling, the broach is raised little by little with a small piece of paper, and the rifling becomes deeper and deeper. This kind of work had to be done by careful people, and each rifling in the barrel had to be drawn hundreds of times before it was formed, and the broach had to be lubricated with whale oil while being drawn, and the whole barrel had to go through more than 2,000 rounds of reciprocation after being drawn.

A skilled craftsman pulls at most one rifle barrel a day, plus the casting and installation of forging, grinding, threading, butt and flintlock device, and three craftsmen can barely complete a rifle or three pistols in a day, which is really not fast. Moreover, there is still a scrap rate problem in the process of drilling, boring, and rifling the barrel, and on average, even if an assembly line is used for production, according to the current production capacity of the Imperial Metal Group, the full production of rifles will not exceed ten a day.

In terms of the manufacturing process of the barrel, Hong Tao did not see anything that could be improved, and the only thing that could give full play to his strengths was to teach Qi Zu and the craftsmen how to carburize and bake the surface of the barrel, and then carburize and bake the flintlock device to make them more corrosion-resistant while increasing the surface hardness. Don't look at this as just a few small skills, but they are the essence of hundreds of years of craftsmen, for Qi Zu and other craftsmen, it is a new direction, and you can also carefully ponder and see if it can be used in other places.

(To be continued.) )