On the first day of the first lunar month, people begin to greet each other for the new year. The door of Hujiazhuang www.biquge.info is very lively, and the people who are qualified to give New Year's greetings to Xia Nan and Lin Weiye come to pay New Year's greetings to the two.

Fortunately, Nan in the summer, accustomed to this kind of scene, subordinates give you New Year's greetings, whether it is pure respect and courtesy, or with the idea of pleasing the boss, it is human nature, Chinese just attach importance to and pay attention to these etiquette, can not avoid.

Lin Weiye was completely uncomfortable, and after dealing with Tan Shan and other acquaintances, he all pushed Xia Nan to greet him, and he took Fu Nanying to hide back in the room.

On the second day of the first lunar month, two heavyweights were added to the New Year's greetings - Fu Nandi of Tinan Pass and Huang Luo of Qingshui Mountain.

It is extremely rare for the lord of the Li people to give New Year's greetings to the Han people, and the two of them are not for courtesy, but because of the strength of the escort team. After seeing with his own eyes the falling flowers and flowing water of the guards beating the foot slashing mountain, Fu Nandi strengthened his determination to hug Xia Nan's thighs, otherwise he was such a small mountain and would not be enough to cut off the foot and stuff the gap between his teeth. Although Huang Luo is the lord of Dazhai, but he asked himself that it is better to cut off his feet, and heard that even Huang Mengjia, who is known as "Li Zhai Xiaofengxian", has been defeated by the escort twice, so he decided to have a good relationship with Xia Nan, so as not to offend the other party one day and follow in the footsteps of the footsteps.

For the visit of the two, Xia Nan gave enough enthusiasm and attention - in the future, the Li people who will control Qiongzhou Mansion and occupy half of the island will be a great help to themselves.

In addition to personally receiving and entertaining, he also gave each of them 200 catties of salt, 200 pieces of cotton cloth, and 50 iron farm tools.

On the fifth day of the first lunar month, Xia Nan convened the steward and announced two decisions: first, the holiday ended on the sixth day of the first lunar month, the factory resumed work, and all the guards returned; Second, the arsenal prepared enough ammunition, and after the Lantern Festival, attacked Chopping Mountain.

After the meeting, Xia Nan found Lin Weiye: "I said that Engineer Lin, the arsenal has been put into production, or there are only guns without guns, I am pulling out to fight, and I am panicking without guns in my hands!" Why don't you get me two small cannons to be brave, I'm going to fight other people's stockades now, not flat fields. ”

Lin Weiye said with a smile: "You use an 18th-century flintlock pistol to bully the minority brothers who only have hook knives, what kind of cannon do you need, kill chickens with a knife!" Besides, I still want to wait for the coke to be in place, and then follow the process of making a rifle to get a standardized cast cannon, but the time is not yet ripe. ”

"Don't be embarrassed, I'll help you get angry, Huang Mengjia wants to rob Fu Nanying, not Maria. I'll leave it here, if you don't get me two small cannons, I won't fight, and I won't care when Huang Mengjia comes to rob people. ”

Although he knew that this was a joke, but seeing that Xia Nan's demand for artillery was very urgent, Lin Weiye thought about it and replied: "Okay, it just so happens that I also want to try the graphitization annealing process first, so I will practice it." ”

According to Lin Weiye's assumption, in the absence of coke, the furnace temperature does not meet the requirements, and there will be no qualified gray iron. And like the Ming army, using brittle and hard white-mouthed iron cast cannons is something he can't tolerate.

The characteristics of white iron determine that the cast cannon can not be boring, the inner wall is rough and uneven, if you want to push out the shell smoothly, you can only make the diameter of the shell much smaller than the caliber of the barrel, and in this way, the excessive clearance leads to poor air tightness, and most of the thrust of gunpowder combustion is wasted, so the cannon can neither go far, nor accurate. Moreover, the white iron is too brittle, coupled with the air hole produced by traditional clay mold casting, which makes the barrel easily explode.

As for the graphitization annealing process, it is to use white iron to cast a barrel with a smaller caliber and a thinner wall thickness, and then annealing to obtain a barrel made of malleable cast iron, which can be cut with a knife to make the barrel neat and smooth inside and outside, and the shell can be made closer to the caliber of the barrel, with a smaller clearance, and the same gunpowder thrust is greater, and the cannon can shoot farther and shoot more accurately.

As for the method of manufacturing cannon barrels, Lin Weiye decided to use Gong Zhenlin's iron mold casting method in the late Qing Dynasty.

Gong Zhenlin, Lin Zexu, and Wei Yuan were contemporaries, had innovative ideas, were good at studying Western studies, and had a certain degree of research on Western arithmetic and firearms. During the First Opium War, the British army invaded and the Qing army was defeated, so Zhejiang Province set up an artillery bureau to cast new artillery to meet emergency needs and appoint Gong Zhenlin to supervise the production. Previously, artillery was cast using clay molds. It takes a long time for the clay to dry after it is molded, and it takes about a month from the start of construction to the start of the gun. Gong Zhenlin presided over the construction of the cannon in winter, the rain and snow continued, the mud mold could not be dried, and it could not be concocted. Gong Zhenlin initiated the idea of casting iron cannons with iron molds, and under his auspices, the trial production was soon successful, which greatly accelerated the speed of cannon making.

Compared with the clay mold, the advantage of the iron mold is that it can be reused, reducing the casting man-hours and reducing the cost; The iron mold does not contain water, and will not produce bubbles like the mud mold, which will leave an air hole on the gun body, reducing the chance of exploding; Moreover, the cannon cast in iron mold is smooth inside and out. At that time, the Qing Dynasty commented that Gong Zhenlin's iron mold casting cannon was "smooth and agile, not inferior to the West", and the craftsmanship was close to that of the Western powers.

The specific process flow is as follows: firstly, an iron mold is made, and the iron mold is also cast with a clay mold. According to the size of the barrel to be made, make a mud cannon model, then divide the mud cannon into two petals, spin the inner surface smooth and regular, and dry it, and then pour the molten iron to fit the two iron molds together to obtain the cast iron mold. When casting iron cannon with iron mold, first brush the inner surface of the mold with fine rice husk ash and fine sand mud and add water to form the paint, and then paint the second layer of paint prepared by ultra-fine coal powder, and then hoop the iron mold, bake and assemble the mud core, and pour in molten iron. After solidification, the iron mold is taken off immediately, and when the gun body is still red-hot, the burr is removed, the mud core is removed, and the finished product is obtained.

Before making a clay cannon model, Lin Weiye asked Xia Nan's opinion: "There are many kinds of small cannons, which one do you want to build?" ”

Xia Nan asked: "You recommend several of the most famous ones, which should be used in the field, requiring good mobility, sufficient power, and easy transportation." ”

Talking about the famous guns of the smoothbore gun era, Lin Weiye is like a treasure: "According to the artillery standards of the Napoleonic era, Britain and France have the most complete artillery systems, British naval guns are stronger than France, and French land field guns are stronger than Britain." Personally, I recommend that the French field guns be used in the land war, and the 3-pounder guns that are too lethal should be removed, and howitzers and mortars are not the mainstream of the black powder era, so the remaining option is the Napoleonic gun. ”