That corner of the machine repair shop had become Liu Li's temporary hideout. The familiar smell of machine oil, metal shavings, and welding fumes in the air made her feel more comfortable than in the office.
The conditions were truly harsh. However, Liu Li wasn't afraid. She had encountered similar situations before at the Hongxing Machinery Factory, where Master Wang had told her to stay calm. This time, she did the same, focusing her mind and starting from the very basics. She spent most of the day just maintaining and adjusting that old C620 lathe. She re-oiled the guide rails and lead screws, removed the protective cover clogged with iron filings, and checked the electrical wiring for aging or looseness. She worked meticulously, as if it were her own old partner. Foreman Ma passed by, a cigarette dangling from his lips, glanced at her, and said nothing, but there was something else in his eyes.
Making fixtures was even more challenging. The materials were all scraps salvaged from the warehouse, and if the dimensions didn't fit, she had to modify them herself. Without a planer, she had to shave the thick steel plates bit by bit with a sledgehammer and chisel, the vibrations making her hands numb; without a milling machine, she had to grind out the complex shapes bit by bit with a file and a hand grinder, sparks flying onto the fixtures and burning small holes in them.
For those few days, she practically lived in the machine repair shop. She arrived before dawn and didn't leave until it was completely dark. The cuffs of her work clothes were frayed, her hands had several cuts, and her fingernails were filled with indelible grease. The experienced mechanics in the repair team went from initially watching her struggle to occasionally handing her a better wrench, or quietly saying, "Add some soybean oil, tighten it slowly," when she was wrestling with a difficult thread.
Fu Jingchen would come over whenever he had free time. If he couldn't help, he would get her food or hand her a tub of hot water when she was so tired she couldn't straighten her back. The two didn't talk much, but they understood each other.
Zhou Wei and Sun Mei also came to take a look out of curiosity. Seeing Liu Li's hands covered in grease as she painstakingly scraped at a rough jig base, Zhou Wei adjusted his glasses, said nothing, and left. Sun Mei, however, slightly pursed her lips, thinking it was too "low-class" and not something a proper technician should be doing.
Liu Li didn't care at all. All her attention was focused on the gradually taking shape jig in her hands. The curvature of the jaws had to be able to evenly grip the workpiece without damaging it; the threads of the fine-tuning screw had to be smooth without any jamming; the positions of the set screws, which served as the force application points, had to be accurately calculated so that the force could be precisely transmitted…
Lacking a dial indicator stand, she made do with a magnetic base attached to the bed frame; lacking specialized measuring instruments, she relied on feeler gauges and her sense of touch to repeatedly verify the measurements. She personally oversaw every part and every assembly step, making repeated adjustments. She knew that this rudimentary tooling was her only hope for validating her ideas, and she couldn't afford to be careless.
A few days later, a “prestressed controllable clamping device” that looked somewhat bulky and even a little rough, but had a complete structure and function, was finally firmly fixed on the front box of that old C620.
Looking at this "rustic" thing that embodied countless hours of her sweat and effort, Liu Li let out a long sigh of relief. She wiped the sweat from her forehead with the back of her oil-stained hands, and a relaxed smile appeared on her face—the first one she had shown in days.
The tools were rudimentary, and the conditions were harsh. But she personally took that first step, a truly solid one. Next came the real test. Hopefully, she could meet the requirements. Yes, she definitely could, Liu Li cheered herself on.
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