Cass really was bright and his Russian was improving rapidly. He had lived in Grantville for a year and more after the Ring of Fire. A lot of tricks and workarounds had been developed in that time, so Cass was quite a bit more familiar with the how-to of building a modern tech base than most up-timers had been before the Ring of Fire. For instance:
“What you need is a drop forge, Andy,” Cass said a few weeks after he had arrived at the Gun Shop. “Instead of building AK3’s by hand.”
“A drop forge?” Andrei was none too fond of being addressed as “Andy,” but it wasn’t worth it to fight through his current hangover.
“Yep. Take a big-ass weight. Lift it up about ten feet, then drop it. Force is mass times velocity, and by the time it hits, it has some velocity to multiply the big-ass weight.”
“And how do you lift the big weight?”
“It doesn’t matter. Look, a couple of peasants turning a crank will get the job done. Sure, a steam cylinder would do it faster and more efficiently, but you want to wait for those prigs at the Dacha to get around to providing you a steam ram?”
That was a point. Andrei was increasingly upset by the way the Dacha was being corrupted by western notions. So he nodded and they worked on the design of the drop forge. A very hot piece of iron would be placed in the bottom form. Then the weighted top form would be dropped. After which four slaves would crank the weighted top form back up and the part would be removed.
It would take four big, strong, men almost ten minutes to crank the “hammer” up to the top of its arch. During which time, another dollop of iron would be heated white hot. Wham! Another part.
Not a completed part. The chambers had to be finished using a boring machine, also human-powered, this time two men on a stationary bicycle. The chamber locks, which on the AK3 were a lever-action made of several parts, would have the parts stamped out by drop forges, then be finished and assembled. The chambers were all of a standardized size. But Russian gunsmithing, up to this time, hadn’t focused at all on heavily standardized calibers. There just weren’t that many rifles in Russia that had precisely the same caliber of barrel. So the new guns almost had to come out of the Gun Shop, which, when it came down to it, suited both Andrei and Cass just fine.
All this took time and it wasn’t the only thing they were working on. The czar, the patriarch, and Sheremetev wanted cannon. Good cannon. Breech-loading cannon. Cass told them they couldn’t do it, that they didn’t have the quality of steel needed for up-time cannon.
Andrei, a fairly bright guy in his own right, wanted to know why.
“Strength and flexibility,” Cass told him. “Modern metals are produced using precise mixes of elements: just enough carbon, just enough tungsten, just enough chromium, for a weight of steel heated to just the right heat for just the right amount of time.”
After some consideration, Andrei asked, “What has to be strong and what has to be flexible?”
The question brought Cass Lowry up short. The whole damn thing had to be strong and had to have some flexibility which was why you didn’t make cast iron cannons. But he got the point. They had muzzle-loading cannons down-time. They apparently made them strong enough and flexible enough so that they didn’t blow up all that often. What aspect of an up-time cannon had to have fancy modern steel? “I’d say it’s probably the breech mechanism,” he said after a pause. “Modern cannon use an interrupted-screw breech lock.”
“And how does that work?”
Cass described the way the screw had parts of the threading cut out of it so that it could be slid into the breech, which also had parts of its threading cut out and ended with, “You see, the threads of the breech and of the breechblock have to be really strong and take a tremendous amount of force.”
“Yes, I see,” Andrei said. “But you wouldn’t need an interruption if you didn’t have lots of threads. That is right, yes?”
“Well, sure.”
“So why can’t you add more threads to the interrupted screw to compensate for the weaker metals that we have now?”
Cass didn’t know and hated admitting it.
“We will experiment. We will make interrupted-screw breech locks and see how well they withstand the force of firing.”
“Fine, as long as you know I won’t be standing anywhere near them when we do the test firing.”
Andrei shrugged. “That’s what slaves are for.”
Chapter 46
February 1634
Filip and Gregorii looked over the new steam barge design before they sealed the packet.
The more standardized design the Dacha had developed after looking over Vladimir’s notes was two ten-inch-wide cylinders side-by-side, with the stroke of the first setting the second and vice versa, to produce a reciprocating engine. They didn’t bother with a condenser on the ones for the steamboats and steam barges, as there was generally water available in a river. So they released the steam to the same chimney that carried the smoke fire. They used a pot boiler and ceramic tiles for the fire bed. The engines built that way—and especially the boilers—were so inefficient that they were an insult to steam power. However, they would fit on a thirty-foot-long, ten-foot-wide river barge and they would push the thing through the water.