Rise of the 1630s South America

Chapter 1526 Advancement of basic industries ([-])

The east coast in September has come out of the cold winter.

Perhaps because the temperature has gradually rebounded in recent years, the east coast no longer looks so cold in early spring, especially in the Duck Lake Basin, which has always been relatively warm.The workers at the Zhenhai Shipyard have already done their work all morning. Some young and strong workers took off their thick work clothes, and with steam on their heads, they climbed up and down in the dry dock to give a huge ship Maintenance is in progress.

This huge ship is also well-known in the East Coast, and that is the second ship of the "Executive Committee" class battleship "East Coast Man" built with national donations.This kind of super battleship with huge displacement and powerful firepower spends most of its time in the coastal waters of the east coast, and rarely sails far away, but even so, its maintenance costs are frighteningly high.The Executive Committee once wanted to completely seal up this flashy warship, but in the end, considering that this ship embodies the efforts of the people and has become a kind of spiritual sustenance, coupled with the fierce opposition from the Navy, it gave up because of this, but the sealing of the "Executive Committee" But it is inevitable, because the navy needs to save money above.

Maintenance work on the "East Coast Man" has been going on for several days.Today, Zhenhai Shipyard intends to apply a new technology to this warship after obtaining the consent of the navy, that is, to use a brass with a particularly high zinc content to replace the original pure copper plate to cover the bottom of the ship, in order to save huge costs.

In fact, among the few warships in the East Coast Navy whose bottoms are covered with copper plates (mostly experimental), pure copper plates are generally used to cover the bottom shell of the ship.However, from the perspective of cost saving, people on the east coast have been thinking about how to use a relatively economical and cheap material to replace pure copper to cover the bottom of the ship.

The simplest idea is naturally to add base metals to the copper. More simply, it is to add zinc or tin to it, two metals that can be purchased in large quantities in the Viceroyalty of Peru.However, it is also particular about making this kind of copper-tin or copper-zinc alloy, that is, the alloy you make must be suitable for processing.

To give the simplest example, the red brass ingots with a zinc content of about 10-20% produced by people on the east coast are more convenient for processing and forging.However, if it is brass with a zinc content of about 35%, it will be somewhat difficult to process. After all, the hardness of this alloy will increase with the increase of zinc content, which undoubtedly restricts the wide application of this alloy. ——You know, because of the frequent wars in Europe and the massive expansion of armaments in various countries (casting cannons is undoubtedly a big copper consumer), the price of copper is not cheap in Europe at this time, so that it was transported back by the Dutch from the Far East as ballast. The price of copper sheets in Japan has skyrocketed, so how to reduce the use of copper has become the key to reducing costs and increasing efficiency.

Fortunately, the sky paid off. After years of research, the High School Affiliated to the Engineering Technology Research Institute (a "high school" comparable to the High School Affiliated to the Academy of Natural Sciences) has developed a copper-zinc alloy with a zinc content of 40%.The amazing thing about this brass is that when exposed to high temperatures of 800°C (which is easily achieved), its internal structure is in the beta phase.Brass in this structure is much easier to process than other structures (α phase), so it is an ideal substitute for hull cladding, and the price is much cheaper than pure copper.

The mystery of this kind of material ratio and processing is worthless to put it bluntly, because the people on the east coast only discovered it by accident after constant trial and error, and they still haven't understood the reason - but some people have already used microscopes I have observed the surface of this metal, but unfortunately because the magnification is too low, I can't see anything. Metallography has not yet started on the east coast-but if no one reminds me, outsiders may only be lucky. It is possible to come up with this kind of low-cost brass, but the probability is undoubtedly very low, and it may not be foolish for someone to invest huge sums of money in continuous trial and error and new product development. You must know that these projects are on the east coast. But there are special allocations. In addition, the "Science Spring" project fund established by Qiangquansheng Times will also invest a part of it. Otherwise, how can it be possible to continuously achieve results in basic materials?

And when it comes to the progress made in basic materials and processes, in addition to tin-plated sheets and cheap brass, the East Coast has also developed a brand-new metal—a metal named "nickel" by the Academy of Natural Sciences— —Have a certain understanding.Because when the researchers of the Academy of Natural Sciences were doing experiments, they found that adding nickel, a brand new element, to copper would make the alloy whitish in color, which was very similar to silver.So much so that at one time they thought they had produced real silver, but the law of conservation of energy told them that this was impossible, so the final conclusion was that this was a brand new alloy, suspected to be a kind of white copper produced in southern China, so let’s say Call it cupronickel.

Since the white copper was produced through continuous proportioning experiments, the researchers of the Academy of Natural Sciences have "committed to old problems". They took the special funds allocated by their superiors and began to play with it. Add other things such as iron, Manganese, zinc, tin and other elements, trying to come up with some new gadgets.It's a pity that all kinds of strange alloy metals they produced have not found anything of great commercial promotion value so far. Perhaps the suspected Chinese cupronickel can be used to make some copperware, but others are currently I haven't found anything special yet - it's worth mentioning that since white copper and silver look similar, the State Administration of Precious Metals is already considering whether to apply for this alloy to be included in the control, so as not to be used for casting The silver dollar detracts from the credibility of East Coast currency.Of course, they may be a little unfounded, because there is no record of large-scale production of this alloy metal so far. It's really silly, after all, natural copper-nickel alloys are not easy to find.

Well, let us turn our attention to the three-deck battleship "East Coaster".It is said that since the people of the Engineering Technology Research Institute produced brass with a zinc content of 40%, Tieling Special Steel Works immediately received an administrative order to cooperate with it and carry out small-scale trial production.The factory also reacted very quickly. In the shortest time, some crucibles for smelting this brass alloy were manufactured, and then two whole copper alloy ingots were cast.

Afterwards, the copper ingots were transported to the nearby Western Rolling Plant on a flat rail car—the former Western Forging Plant, Steel Rolling Plant, and Tieling Special Steel Rolling Workshop have been merged into a large enterprise, the Western Rolling Plant. The factory, together with Tieling Special Steel, Tieling Mining Bureau, First Heavy Machinery Factory, Tieling Boiler Factory and other enterprises, formed a large-scale (compared to the poor steel production in the 17th century) coal and steel complex. A source of industrial strength—then uniformly rolled into massive sheets.Some of these thin plates were used for various experiments, such as producing various parts to test performance, such as making copperware to see market response, etc., while the rest were taken to the dry dock of Zhenhai Shipyard , It is intended to be installed and fixed on the bottom of the battleship "East Coaster" to replace the previous expensive and heavy pure copper sheet.

At this time, the installation of the brass sheet is nearing completion.The deputy chief engineer of Zhenhai Shipyard stepped on the slippery and muddy surface of the dock, and after carefully inspecting the bottom of the "Donganren", he nodded in satisfaction.In his opinion, with this relatively cheap new type of brass alloy covering the bottom shell, the workload of maintenance after the ship goes to sea can be greatly reduced in the future. It is still relatively cost-effective.

In the future, when Tieling Special Steel further improves the production process and the production scale increases, so that the production cost of this alloy called "Battleship Brass" is reduced again, it can really be considered to install this alloy on all important battleships. Planting something, because it can really save a lot of maintenance costs on weekdays, but the disadvantage is that the one-time investment is relatively large, so it seems that the top and the Ministry of the Navy are reluctant to part with it.

The anchor of the "East Coast Man" has also been specially treated this time, which is more or less experimental and has no promotional significance, because it is galvanized.When it comes to galvanizing, in fact, the current technology of the East Bank is very immature, because they just "brutally" plate molten zinc on the iron anchor, without flux or electroplating technology, so the effect is not ideal .However, considering that this is only an experiment, it can be reluctantly accepted.

If this galvanized iron anchor can meet everyone's expectations in future experiments, then the next step is to study a new and practical galvanizing process and develop a series of galvanized products (such as galvanized wire mesh, galvanized sheet, Galvanized iron fence, etc.), it can be put on the agenda.There is no doubt that this is a huge market. The premise is that the technology is really practical and cheap enough, otherwise it will be difficult to promote it.

In addition to new technologies such as bottom cladding and galvanized iron anchors, some muskets stored in the armory of the three-deck battleship "East Coast Man" are also quite different, because they also apply new technologies and new processes——

Thanks to the progress of the basic industry, the military equipment industry on the east bank has also developed to a certain extent in the past two years, and under the good market sales situation, the two major military production groups, Dayuhe and North, took advantage of the huge amount of trade Profits, while paying profits and taxes normally, have also begun to gradually replace old machines and technologies, making the overall production level steadily improved.

First of all, in the current weapons and equipment used by the East Coast Army, except for a few stupid guys (such as iron anchors, etc.), most of the metal products have transitioned from wrought iron to the stage of low-carbon steel.Especially now that the main force of the army has replaced the rifled guns using Minie bombs on a large scale, the skilled barrels that were widely used have disappeared. Except for the production of smoothbore guns for export, most of the time Both major military enterprises are producing musket barrels made of mild steel.This is undoubtedly a huge improvement. Both the performance and service life of the gun have made great progress, and the cost may not really increase a lot.

The material of the tool head for processing the barrel and drawing the rifling is basically a special manganese steel alloy smelted in a small crucible. This material is probably the most widely used alloy material in the east coast machining industry, just like ferromanganese. It is widely used in industries such as steam engine cylinders.

Before that, the most used cutting tools in the east coast machining industry were ordinary carbon steel materials.Cutting tools made of this material do not have an economical working life when the cutting speed exceeds about 12 meters per minute, the damage rate is extremely high, and the machining accuracy is not stable enough, and the quality is also very problematic. These factors are undoubtedly directly increases production costs.However, after using manganese steel cutting tools, this situation has been greatly improved, because manganese steel cutting tools are self-hardening tools (that is, air hardening tools), which reduces the uncertainty of heat treatment and makes the upper limit of the allowable cutting speed From 12 meters to 20 meters, this can be described as a huge improvement for a machine.In particular, the progress of basic industries is self-evident for the benefits of the entire industrial production system, and its importance cannot be overstated.

Of course, if we continue to add metal elements such as tungsten, chromium, and vanadium to this manganese steel alloy, there is no doubt that it is very likely to develop a new generation of cutting tools that will continue to increase the cutting speed from 20 meters to nearly 40 meters per minute. It looks like [-] meters.However, the above-mentioned three elements cannot even be restored in the laboratory at present, let alone practical, so the so-called "high-speed steel" is at least in the foreseeable future. Practical manganese steel is good, but it is useless to think too much.

What's more, even if the high-speed steel is really produced by bad luck, it is still a big problem that the existing machine tools on the east coast can match it.Because the existing machine tools are already very reluctant to use manganese steel cutting tools, lack of rigidity, insufficient power, and great vibration will occur under high load and high cutting speed (which will greatly affect processing efficiency and accuracy) are several The main problems, if these problems are not solved, and new machine tools that match new materials are not designed and manufactured, it is impossible to fully enjoy the benefits brought by new materials.At present, many people in the East Coast industry have realized this, and the design of new machine tools using manganese steel cutting tools has entered the mid-market stage, and I believe that there will be results in the future.

Therefore, technological progress is really gradual.There is always market demand first, then there are new processes, new materials and new products, and then the overall industrial level is improved (this process is relatively long); and after the overall level has reached a higher level, fierce market competition puts forward new technologies. Requirements are met, and this cycle goes on and on, eventually becoming a sustainable technology research and development system.Although the traversing people come from the future, it is impossible to conquer the world. What is more important than restoring technology is to establish a social system that allows technology to continue to improve and develop. This is much more important than technology itself.

Breaking away from the overall industrial level of the east coast, pulling seedlings to encourage black technology, can be done occasionally, but if it is done frequently, it will undoubtedly limit the height that the east coast can achieve in the future, which seems even more terrifying.

(End of this chapter)