Chapter 253: A Military Spike

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The Kiln District Steel Plant now produces two kinds of cast iron.

The first is ordinary cast iron refined in a reverberatory furnace. This cast iron has a wide range of uses and is ubiquitous even in later generations: all sorts of cast iron water pipes, railings, pedestals, manhole covers, gates... in short, whenever an object is crude, bulky, and cheap, this is the right material for it.

All along, ordinary cast iron has been the steel plant's main product, once accounting for over 80% of total output.

Now, with the successful breakthrough on the more advanced nodular cast iron, ordinary cast iron's output has slowly dropped to 60%, with the remaining share given over to steel and nodular cast iron.

Nodular cast iron is a high-strength cast iron material. Unlike ordinary gray iron or white iron, nodular cast iron requires a nodulizing and inoculation treatment process during smelting to obtain spheroidal graphite before this product can be made.

With overall properties approaching those of steel, nodular cast iron, based on its excellent performance, can be used to cast parts that bear complex stresses and demand high strength, toughness, and wear resistance. The so-called "replacing steel with iron" refers primarily to nodular cast iron.

In fact, in casting and machining, nodular cast iron's uses far exceed those of steel. One must know that steel's fluidity is very poor, making castings very difficult; whereas nodular cast iron, due to its excellent plasticity and toughness, is the true star, at least in the plane of the Transmigrators.

For example, in a wood-gas engine system, apart from the casing which uses thin iron plate, the internal critical components — including the various mechanical crankshafts, camshafts, connecting shafts, connecting rods, gears, clutch plates, cylinder blocks, and so on — are all actually made of nodular cast iron.

Even in the engines of later generations, parts made of nodular cast iron are still numerous. This material can be cast, forged, and machined. At present, occupying the top of the food chain in the machining and casting fields is precisely this new material that has suddenly risen to prominence.

The reason the steel plant could not produce nodular cast iron before was not because this material's smelting difficulty was so high... at the very least, it is easier than steelmaking. The crux of the issue was that the nodulizer was not in place.

When nodular cast iron is being inoculated inside the furnace, a nodulizer must be added. The primary material in the nodulizer is magnesium, or pure magnesium can be used directly.

Thus, industry is a chain of interlocking links.

The prerequisite for the nodulizer was the chemical plant. Only with the chemical plant and a stable output of hydrochloric acid could the electrolysis process and the seawater magnesium-extraction process be combined to produce enough metallic magnesium for use as a nodulizer.

This is why nodular cast iron could only be a latecomer: the prerequisites were long delayed in arriving. But once all conditions on every front were met, nodular cast iron's output grew quite rapidly. After all, no matter how you look at it, this is just a type of cast iron; its smelting difficulty is certain not to exceed that of steelmaking.

Once the steel plant could mass-produce this widely applicable cast iron, the Transmigration Nation's demand for steel immediately dropped considerably, which also relieved a fair amount of pressure on the steel plant. After all, no matter which way you look at it, the cost of steelmaking is the highest.

This made adjusting the product line very easy. A series of steel processing projects originally intended to be forced through through gritted teeth could now all be put on hold; the steel plant only needed to further refine the steel bar and steel wire production lines: these were the only two products that could not be substituted with other materials.

As for the future, the Industrial Party still had no grand ambitions in steel: tinplate and galvanized iron sheet were the highest points on the technology tree they would climb in the next three years.

Tinplate can be used to make cans; galvanized iron sheet, also called white iron sheet, is an excellent material for containers, such as iron buckets and chimneys.

The base material needed for both of these is the same: low-carbon thin steel plate. To produce steel plate with a thickness of only about 0.2mm, the current steel plant is not yet capable. This requires accumulating more time — the cold-rolled steel production line is enormous in scale and high in technology content, and the Kiln District cannot produce it on its own.

Fortunately, a certain power base's demand for tinplate is not urgent for the time being.

Cans, that sort of thing, are primarily used for offense: when soldiers are in a field-combat state without logistics, cans become a great killer.

However, a look at the overall situation reveals that all of the current Crossing Faction's battles are conducted in coastal areas. Whether naval or land battles, the soldiers under the command of the "Mobile Corps Commander General," who has already entered the Great Ming system, can all receive ample logistical supply on the battlefield; there will be no scenarios of isolated troops penetrating deep on thousand-li raids. So, a luxury like cans can be put off for a while.

..... Such was the product structure of the steel plant. For a very long time to come, the production shares of cast iron, nodular cast iron, and steel would be fixed at the ratio of 50:30:20; even if the steel plant expanded later, this ratio would be hard to change.

After completing their inspection of the entire Kiln District's core steel plant and machinery factory, Yao Zhesheng and Zou Guoqing parted ways. Yao Zhesheng continued on to the power plant to serve as a grand inspector, while Zou Guoqing headed back to his office — among that row of bigwigs' offices on the second floor of the Imperial City, he had a seat.

With a "splash," Yu Sibao burst his head out of the clear, transparent seawater. Letting the seawater stream down his face, the young man did not bother to wipe it off; instead, he whooped and hollered, waving his hands on the sea surface as he swam toward a fishing ship not far away.

Reaching the fishing ship, Yu Sibao first tossed the object in his hand onto the deck, then, like a civet cat, shimmied up a dangling hemp rope and onto the gunwale.

Several fishermen on the ship were huddled together, heads touching, studying the object the young man had thrown aboard. A tall, ruddy-faced man of about forty, holding a coarse-cloth long robe, hurriedly wrapped it around his son's naked body the moment the young man jumped onto the ship: "Be careful now, don't catch a chill."

This man was Yu Sibao's biological father, named Yu Chengde.

The Yu family were ordinary fishermen along the Putian coast, and Yu Chengde was the owner of this dilapidated fishing ship underfoot. This ship, named Green Fish, was 200-liao, and the fishermen aboard all came from the same fishing village.

The spot where the Green Fish was currently anchored was precisely the shore of Luci where the Special Task Fleet had fought its great battle against Zheng Zhilong's fleet that day.

What Yu Sibao had thrown onto the ship was a military spike produced at the Kiln District Machinery Factory. This model of military spike was the earliest crude-steel spike the machinery factory produced, styled after the American M9 bayonet, but with the blade lengthened from the original design and the back serrations removed.

The person holding this now rust-flecked military spike and testing its blade on a salted fish was Yu Sibao's paternal cousin: Yu Chushui. Seeing Sibao come aboard, Yu Chushui shouted to him excitedly: "Sibao, this is a treasure of a knife!"

As he spoke, Yu Chushui viciously slashed at a salted fish hanging from a rope; the thigh-thick salted fish was severed cleanly at the sound.

"Dad, the ship down below is definitely a Sea Merchant's cargo ship, and everyone on it is rich and noble!" Yu Sibao, paying no mind to his cousin at this moment, excitedly extended a hand from within the coarse-cloth robe; in his palm lay a silver ingot of about 5 taels, long since oxidized black by the seawater.

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