Chapter 35 Assembly Lines and Calipers

Last time, it was said that Liu Hou returned to the government after the group fight, and unexpectedly found that Pu Yuan, Zhang Zhongjing and other logistics troops had arrived, and Liu Hou immediately assigned tasks to them. Zhang Zhongjing is naturally responsible for the establishment of the Jingzhou branch of the "People's Hospital", and at the same time, he must also build the framework of the medical school, because only by continuously cultivating more qualified doctors can the People's Hospital have a foundation for survival.

Pu Yuan was responsible for setting up various processing plants, especially firearms factories, which were urgently needed. Liu Hou plans to base himself on Jingzhou, the land of the four wars, then there will inevitably be a series of wars, and the demand for firearms will be huge at that time.

Pity these logistics troops, they are not at all easier than the combat troops who arrived in the early stage, they just arrived in Jingzhou before they had time to rest before they were urged by Liu Hou to start work. Liu Hou is really more Zhou Peel than Zhou Peel. Liu Hou is also a last resort, he has a hunch, the war is about to break out, and now if you can prepare more, you must prepare as much as possible, which is the same as sweating more in peacetime and less bloodshed in wartime. Liu Hou could only continue to raise the salaries and bonuses of these logistics personnel and compensate them materially.

On this day, Liu Hou was discussing with Pu Yuan about building vernier calipers. Pu Yuan was the director of the Smelting and Forging Research Institute, he had just cast 3,000 knives for Zhuge Liang, which was praised by Zhuge Liang, and now presided over a number of studies on smelting and casting, and was also in charge of the manufacture of muskets and artillery.

However, after so many years of research, the smelting technology has not improved much, and correspondingly, the production of muskets is not high. So far, Liu Hou's troops have only been armed with about 5,000 full-fledged suifa guns.

Part of the reason for this is because of the continuous improvement in the early stage, such as the successive addition of rifling, sights, etc., and most of the guns originally made by the guide zhì were recast.

Although the smelting and forging technology has not been improved much, there is still a certain improvement, which makes the strength of the barrel material also be improved to a certain extent, and the rifling increases the airtightness and a series of effects, so the firing range of the pistol has been greatly increased from the original 50 steps to 100 steps, which can basically restrain the general archers. Of course, except for Huang Zhong, Lu Bu and other sharpshooters who are born with divine powers. This also caused some guns with a short range to be reforged in the early stage, further reducing the number of guns in possession.

In the final analysis, the reason is that the production efficiency is too low, which is so low that Liu Hou is really unbearable. After several years of accumulation, he only has 5,000 muskets, although he can basically do one musket by the hands of the Hong soldiers, but the barrel is a consumable, and it is possible to damage some of them in a few battles or even a big battle, and this problem must be solved as much as possible.

What's more, due to the lack of a limited number of muskets, his musket team has been unable to expand for a long time. Fei Yi has already proposed a plan to expand the army, but for the time being, he can only recruit pikemen and sword and shield soldiers, and the musketeers don't have to think about it, which makes Liu Hou a little aggrieved.

In later generations, Jin Jiannu vainly said, "Manchu people are less than 10,000, and Manchu is invincible." Liu Hou thinks it is arrogant. But he believed that his musketeers would be "invincible".

But that's also a full 10,000 people, and now I only have more than 5,000 musketeers on hand, and in this era when tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people are waging wars on a scale at every turn, these more than 5,000 people are simply at the level of stuffing teeth. Not to mention holding a front-loaded black powder gun, even if they were to kill them with an AK, hundreds of thousands of people would not know how long they would be killed.

Therefore, Liu Hou urgently needed to improve production efficiency in order to arm more musketeers. So he came up with the idea of an assembly line. He asked the workshops to reform the process as much as possible, and once everything was done by a single craftsman from start to finish, now it is divided into different parts, each type of work is only one part, and finally the individual parts are assembled into a finished product.

For example, a musket, which used to be made from beginning to end by a skilled craftsman, could barely make one in a month, and the speed was so slow that Liu Hou hated it. But this is still a highly skilled craftsman, and I don't know how long it will take to get it out after changing to an ordinary craftsman, and the scrap rate is much higher.

However, after the assembly line operation, a musket can be separated from many parts, such as striking iron, flint, main spring, buckle spring, movement, barrel, stock, sight, etc. These parts can be built separately by different people. Even, the same part can also be divided into different processes, such as the barrel, which can be divided into drilling, grinding the chamber, rifling and other processes, and each process can also be done by different craftsmen.

In this way, the benefits are obvious, each craftsman can do the type of work he is good at, the speed will naturally increase, and the repetition of the same work every day will also help to improve the proficiency of the process.

Liu Hou, who came from later generations, naturally knew the great power of assembly line operations. Who knew that Liu Hou proposed the assembly line operation, and Pu Yuan was not too surprised. It turned out that the Qin Dynasty had a similar form of organized production, which surprised Liu Hou.

However, there is an unavoidable problem in assembly line operations, that is, the problem of dense measurement. If the size of the parts made cannot be uniform, it is very likely that there will be problems in assembling, so Liu Hou needs to have a high-density ruler.

At present, the measurement accuracy of the ruler is generally only to the minute, that is, one-tenth of an inch, and then there is no more. Liu Hou told him about the concept of vernier calipers and asked him to try it out first.

The vernier caliper consists of two parts: the main ruler and the vernier attached to the main ruler that can slide. There are 10, 20 or 50 grids on the cursor, and according to the different grids, vernier calipers can be divided into ten-degree vernier calipers, 20-degree vernier calipers, 50-degree vernier calipers, etc.

Such an idea surprised Pu Yuan. He is no stranger to calipers and often uses them, but he didn't expect that adding a vernier could improve the measurement accuracy so much. Liu Hou was also surprised when he saw Pu Yuan take out a Han Dynasty caliper, because this caliper was already very similar to the vernier calipers of later generations except that there was no vernier caliper.

If he is a student of archaeology, he will know that some copper calipers have been unearthed in some Han tombs, which look very similar to the current calipers, but they are still scales, and there is no vernier yet, so it is impossible to make a measurement of several decimaths.

With Liu Hou's detailed explanation, it is naturally not a problem for Pu Yuan to get a vernier caliper on the basis of the Han Dynasty caliper, so that the biggest problem of assembly line production was quickly solved, and the Jingzhou branch of the secret firearms factory soon began to try assembly line production.

However, the Jingzhou branch does not include a complete production line for all processes. Some core processes such as smelting, forging, and barrel drilling are still processed by the Ministry of Industry in Chengdu, and then transported to the Yangtze River at half cost, together with other parts produced in Jingzhou, and finally assembled into a complete starting pistol.

The Yangtze River is fast, inexpensive, and has no pressure on transportation, so it will not have much adverse effect on this production method of distributing assembly lines between the two places.

It is more conducive to the confidentiality of the process to put the production process in two places, especially the safety of some core components in the rear rather than the production in Jingzhou, which may be lost at any time.

After a period of running-in, the production efficiency has been improved, and Liu Hou's 5000 Hong army has gradually been replenished with guns, and the gun reserve is constantly increasing.

And Liu Hou waited anxiously for the news of Guan Gong. The Second Regiment (see Chapter 27), which Liu Hou later sent to meet Guan Gong, finally received Guan Gong and was now escorting Guan Gong and retreating in the direction of Jingzhou City.

Time regressed to August, Guan Yu flooded the Seventh Army, captured the forbidden Pang De, Cao Ren defended Fancheng, Guan Yu could not attack for a long time. Later, Sima Yi proposed to Cao Cao to secretly form an alliance with Sun Wu, allowing Sun Quan to send troops to attack Jingzhou and copy Guan Yu's nest, but it was destroyed by Liu Hou, a prophetic traveler.

At the same time, Cao Cao sent famous generals Xu Huang and Zhang Liao to rush to Cao Ren's aid, and spread rumors that Jingzhou had been seized by Sun Quan, which made Guan Yu's army shake.

On the contrary, after Xu Huang arrived at the front, he got in touch with Cao Ren, and the morale of Cao Ren's army was greatly increased. Xu Huang took advantage of Guan Yu's army to attack Guan Yu's stronghold when his heart was shaken, defeated Guan Yu, and Xu Huang took the opportunity to open up the Fancheng route.

At this time, the flood receded, Cao Ren and Zhang Liao led the army to cooperate with Xu Huang to attack Guan Yu, and Wen Ping cut off Guan Yu's grain route from the waterway, and Guan Yu was defeated and retreated. Most of Cao Ren's generals wanted to take advantage of the victory to pursue, and Zhao Yan, who joined the army, believed that Guan Yu should retain a certain strength to fight Sun Quan, and it was not appropriate to pursue. Cao Ren agreed with Zhao Yan and did not deploy a pursuit. After Cao Cao learned the news of Guan Yu's retreat, he really sent someone to convey the order not to pursue Guan Yu.

However, if Cao Jun does not pursue Guan Yu, it does not mean that no one pursues him. Sun Quan sent Sun Jiao to lead 30,000 troops to ambush Guan Yu, who was repulsing.

Sun Jiao, the word Shulang. Jiangdong Sun clan, the son of Sun Jian's younger brother Sun Jing, Sun Quan's cousin, Ren Du escorted the general, and the elite soldiers under his command were known as elite troops. Guan Yu, a poor hero, was ambushed by him, and only 5,000 soldiers and horses fled all the way to Maicheng.

Maicheng is a small city, the city is small, and the walls are low, which is not conducive to defense. Guan Yu knew that he was lonely, so he sent Liao Hua to break through the siege and ask for help from the Shu generals Liu Feng and Meng Da stationed in Shangyong.

Liu Feng's original name was Kou Feng, and he was Liu Bei's righteous son, and after he arranged for Liao Hua to rest, he pulled Meng Da to discuss the matter of rescuing Guan Gong:

Liu Feng said to Meng Da: "Uncle is trapped, what can I do?" ”

Meng Dadao: "The soldiers of Eastern Wu are brave and brave, and Maicheng is the land of projectiles; I also heard that Cao Cao personally supervised an army of four or five hundred thousand, stationed in Mopi, measuring the people of the mountain city such as us, how could they defeat the strong soldiers of the two families? Don't be underestimated. ”

Liu Feng said: "I know all this. But Guan Gong is my uncle, how can he bear to see death and not save him? ”

Meng Da laughed and said: "The general takes Guan Gong as his uncle, I'm afraid Guan Gong may not take the general as his nephew." I once heard that when the king of Hanzhong accepted the general as his righteous son, Guan Gong was not happy.

Later, after the king of Hanzhong ascended the throne, he wanted to set up an heir, and asked Kong Ming, who said: "This is a family matter, the lord, you just need to ask the two generals Guan and Zhang." So the king of Hanzhong sent people to Jingzhou to ask Guan Gong, who thought that the general was the son of a moth and could not be arrogated, and persuaded the king of Hanzhong to leave the general far away in the land of Shangyong Mountain City, so as to prevent future troubles.

Everyone knows about this, but doesn't the general himself know? Do you still want to take risks today because of this so-called uncle and nephew? ”

Liu Feng said: "Although your words are correct, what words do I use to refuse Liao Huahao?" ”

Meng Dadao: "You just said that you just recovered the mountain city, and the people's hearts are undecided, so they don't dare to send troops casually, for fear that the mountain city will be lost." ”

Liu Feng listened to him, and the next day, he asked Liao Hua to come over and told him the above reasons that he could not rescue Guan Gong. Liao Hua was shocked, knocked his head on the ground and said: "If this is the case, then Guan Gong will be closed!" Meng Da said: "Even if we go, it's useless, how can a glass of water save a fire caused by a cart of firewood and grass?" General, please return quickly and wait for the Shu soldiers to come to the rescue. ”

Liao Hua cried and begged, and Liu Feng and Meng Da all brushed their sleeves away. Governor Liao Hua couldn't do anything, thinking about finding the king of Hanzhong for help, so he got on the horse and scolded out of the city and looked at Chengdu. This incident laid a hidden danger for the future struggle between Liu Feng and Liu Hou.

Poor Guan Gong was trapped in the wheat city, there was no grain and grass inside, the camp was full of wounded soldiers, and the morale was low, and there were 20,000 elite soldiers of Eastern Wu attacking the city day and night, and there was no hope for reinforcements. Rao is like this, and the injured Guan Gong also led the army to hold on for nearly a month, which shows that Guan Gong is indeed a hero. Just when they were about to despair, they finally waited for reinforcements.

ps. Because there is no manuscript left, it is estimated that it will be updated late, please understand.