novelden Chapter 708 This is what you call talent.
Chapter 708 This is what you call talent.
The gears were too small, forcing Jiangxia to use a scanner.
A green screen appeared, and a 3D model of the gears and detailed parameters were instantly projected onto Jiang Xia's retina. Looking at the fluctuating numbers, Jiang Xia's teeth chattered. "You? You're using a longitudinal lathe from a watch factory?"
"No! No, no, no!" Weng Dehai jerked his head up as if pricked by a needle, the color draining from his face instantly. His hands waved frantically, his voice filled with terror, "I can't use it! That...that's a public treasure! Using it...using it would be a mistake! I...I can't cause any more trouble for Xiao Wang..."
Useless?
groove!
Slitting machine tools, especially those from Switzerland, represented the pinnacle of precision machinery manufacturing at the time, particularly in fields such as watches and medical devices.
The two Swiss-type lathes that the watch factory imported from Switzerland caused the Ministry of Light Industry a considerable financial strain for a while. If it weren't for the desire to achieve some results during the anniversary celebration and shake off the constant reputation of being "female-dominated," those bigwigs who had always wanted to focus on developing consumer goods would definitely have been reluctant to part with them.
However, these two machine tools maintain an absolute advantage in the field of micro-parts processing, namely watch gears, with an accuracy of ±1 mm.
Unfortunately, it's too specialized. The size of the parts that can be processed is also limited. The processing diameter is ≤ 130 mm, and the maximum processing length is only 250 mm.
Otherwise, Batumi wouldn't have allowed the "watchmakers" to sell this equipment everywhere.
But look at the teeth of these gears! Each tooth looks as if it was pressed out of the most precise mold, with an incredibly clear, sharp, and uniform outline. The tooth root transition is smooth and rounded, and the tooth tip line is as straight as a ruler. If it weren't for the obvious machining marks visible when the gears are magnified, Jiang Xia would have thought that this Master Weng had mastered powder metallurgy technology.
Good heavens, judging from the finished product, it really doesn't look like it was machined. You know, those two Swiss-type machine tools can only achieve a surface roughness of Ra 0.4–0.8 mm for steel parts, while the finished part in front of Jiang Xia has a roughness of Ra 0.1–0.2 mm.
What does this mean? It's almost like a mirror!
As Jiang Xia looked at the part parameters projected in the virtual space, his teeth clenched and his gums bulged.
Isn't this even better than the "Mirror Immortal's" craftsmanship?
Jiang Xia got up, moved a desktop clamp from the next office, fixed the magnifying glass to the clamp, and focused on exploring the gear set made by Master Weng.
First, he used pliers to disassemble the assembled gear set, then tried to reassemble it. Jiang Xia had a peculiar obsession with machinery; the quality of a component was judged by its reconfigurability!
Furthermore, Jiang Xia suspected that Master Weng might have switched the materials without authorization, and he needed to verify these things himself.
Toothed profile, no problem!
Surface. No problem!
That depends on the degree of meshing!
Jiang Xia, holding the smallest planetary gear after disassembly, slowly approached the tip of the center gear's tooth. There was no expected "click," nor any stiffness from having to forcefully "press" it in. Just a hair's breadth before the tooth tips touched, the two gears seemed to be precisely captured by an invisible magnetic force, smoothly and silently "sliding" into engagement!
Perfect fit!
Damn, there's not even a return margin?
Jiang Xia then used the finest tip of the tweezers to gently scrape across the toothed surface with a certain amount of force—silently, without even the slightest scratch!
It seems the materials haven't been changed; it's the high-strength alloy steel that we initially provided.
Then the problem is coming...
How did Master Weng achieve such precision and smoothness by hand on such a hard material...?
Jiang Xia's hand holding the tweezers froze in mid-air, remaining motionless for a long while. He slowly raised his head, his gaze fixed intently on Weng Dehai, whose eyes were lowered and whose hands were nervously clasped together.
“Master Weng…” Jiang Xia’s voice trembled slightly, without him even realizing it, “This…this really was…made by hand by you?”
Upon hearing the question, Weng Dehai suddenly raised his head. He opened his mouth as if to explain something, but didn't know where to begin. In the end, he just nodded vigorously, making a muffled "hmm" sound in his throat, and his eyes quickly lowered again, staring at his toes.
"How...did you do that?"
Master Weng didn't say anything, but took out a small package from his pocket.
He opened it layer by layer, revealing several oddly shaped blades, a thing with a surface covered with fine spiral grooves that looked like a miniature bearing sleeve, and an extremely smooth hemispherical inner cavity component.
"that's it."
"Some of the equipment is missing, otherwise... we could have been faster!"
Jiang Xia picked up a blade and examined it closely. The blade angle was tricky, the edge was as thin as a cicada's wing yet exceptionally tough, and the surface was polished to a mirror finish. What surprised him even more was that, through a scanner, he discovered that these tools had extremely high geometric precision, but judging from the machining marks, they could not have been easily made by an ordinary lathe.
"You ground this yourself? This...this skill, it's like you're treating metal like dough!"
"It was passed down from our ancestors!" Master Weng said this with great firmness and certainty, as if stating an eternal truth.
"No way..." Jiang Xia muttered as he quickly reassembled the disassembled gears. "Why didn't my old master have this skill? Back when he was repairing the furnace, he would still swing a sledgehammer and smash it so hard that the roof beams would fall ash..."
Weng Dehai's body seemed even stiffer, and he remained silent for a long while.
Jiang Xia slapped his forehead: "Hey! Look at my mouth!"
A look of regret crossed his face. "I'm sorry, Master Weng, I was too presumptuous! This skill must be one of your most treasured techniques. I shouldn't have pried so deeply..."
That's what he said, but Jiang Xia felt like a cat's paw was scratching at his heart, making him unbearably itchy. He had witnessed this incredible level of craftsmanship in Master Qin's hands before.
But using such tiny gears is unheard of.
If it were him, the only path he could come up with after racking his brains would be to throw resources at it, pile up equipment, and control the environment.
For example, by using a manual scraping process, the straightness of the guide rails of a Swiss-type lathe can be made to ≤ 5 mm/1000 mm. Then, by improving the mechanical feedback mechanism, the repeatability accuracy can be pushed to the limit of ±2 mm.
That's not enough! All processing must be carried out in a cleanroom with constant temperature and humidity, keeping the thermal deformation of the material strictly within ±2 mm/m...
However, all of this seemed so pale and powerless in the face of this silent old craftsman, even... a little ridiculous.
With just a few oddly shaped self-sharpening blades in his pocket, an auxiliary bearing sleeve whose principle is unknown, and a pair of hands that seem to be able to see the soul of materials, he has somehow managed to create god-level gears that are as smooth as mirrors and mesh perfectly!
This action made Jiang Xia, a mechanical geek obsessed with precision machining, feel somewhat embarrassed...
"Forget it, forget it..." Jiang Xia sighed inwardly, forcibly suppressing the urge to investigate. "It's pointless to force someone. Master Weng has his reasons for not wanting to say more. At worst... I'll find a way to give him a few good-natured and hardworking apprentices in the future, as long as this amazing skill isn't lost..."
Just as Jiang Xia was about to settle for second best, Master Weng seemed to have overcome some obstacle. Finally, in his hoarse, low voice, almost as if each word was being spat out, he said:
“The material… is too hard. The knife… needs to be sharpened to be ‘smooth’.” The gesture of “pushing” forward with an extremely slight and slow motion, “the knife… needs to be inserted slowly, like… like pushing cotton… little by little… rubbing.”
He paused again, as if recalling something, and his voice lowered: "Hand speed... steady. Too fast... the material gets mushy... the knife softens... too slow... the material becomes stubborn... the knife breaks."
“Teeth…” He pointed to the old handkerchief spread out on the table, inside which lay several oddly shaped knife tips he had brought. “Sharpening… with eyes… with hands… with… stones.”
He picked up one of them; the tip of the blade had been ground into an extremely precise, strangely contoured shape that conformed to the requirements of an involute. "Carborundum powder... keep going... little by little... grind... like... grinding a mirror."
Finally, he made a very slight wrist rotation: "Finally... fine ointment... cowhide... a little bit... plate. Listen to the sound... look at the light... the sound is 'smooth'... the light is 'flat'... that's it."
His explanation was disjointed, and his words were simple and even somewhat clumsy, but the experience, patience, and almost obsessive pursuit of perfection contained within it gave Jiang Xia a glimmer of understanding.
This is not processing. This is clearly a silent craftsman who, with his life experience and those "ghost hands" that seem to have been kissed by the gods, launched a silent challenge to the cold laws of metal under extremely rudimentary conditions and finally tamed them!
Moreover, Jiang Xia instantly realized: this level of understanding cannot be taught or learned!
Listen to what Master Weng is saying about "smooth," "smooth," and "flat." If Lord Shen heard that, he might get a localized excitement in his brain, and then... well, you know...
But Jiang Xia was different. He could understand from this fragmented and even incoherent speech that Master Weng had truly shared his experience without reservation.
However, these are all highly personalized, unquantifiable, and difficult-to-replicate talents and experiences.
Why are there so few inheritors of the unique skills that have been listed as "intangible cultural heritage" in later generations? Isn't it because they are all tied to a unique "person"? They are as brilliant as fireworks, but also as fragile as fireworks; when the person dies, the skill ends.
Watching Weng Dehai's figure, which seemed to have exhausted all his strength and became even more hunched and silent after he finished speaking, Jiang Xia's lingering regret and unease about "inheritance" gradually dissipated like morning mist meeting the sun, replaced by an unprecedented clarity and determination.
Yes, Master Weng's craftsmanship is a miracle, a solitary peak. It commands respect and is awe-inspiring.
However, the backbone of a nation cannot be supported by a single peak!
Industrialization, standardization, parameterization... this is the only way to enable millions of hands to have the precision of "ghost hands"!
What Jiangxia is pursuing is not just one Master Weng, but thousands upon thousands of "industrial hands" that can consistently produce the same level of precision as Master Weng!
Through precise machine tool design, strict environmental control, standardized process flow, and quantifiable testing methods, this "miraculous skill" has been transformed from a metaphysics that relies on personal talent and insight into a science that can be replicated on a large scale and achieved stably!
Master Weng, please allow me to take another step towards industrialization with your help!