Start with a blacksmith shop.

Chapter 129 Discovering the Problem and the Engine

"Okay, let's leave it at that. The company is still expanding."

Everything costs money, this amount is already quite good!

Liu Xiaodong and the other person then agreed to the profit-sharing plan, and together they made a plan for the company's development next year.

After finishing discussing work matters, all that was left was eating and drinking. They ate more than one of the two lambs.

After eating and drinking their fill, everyone went home. Li Zhenhua and Li Yun returned to their hotel.

"Come home with me for Chinese New Year this year!" The two snuggled on the sofa, a TV drama was playing, but neither of them paid any attention to it.

Hearing Li Yun's question, he fell silent for a while before answering her.

"I won't go to Haicheng this year. I'll just stay at the blacksmith's shop. By then, the people building houses behind me will have left, and it won't be noisy at home anymore. I'll just go back to live there."

Last year we celebrated in Haicheng, and we didn't follow some of the customs. We can't do that this year. We still need to make offerings to the ancestral hall, and on the second day of the Lunar New Year, we have to visit the graves of my grandfather and parents. There are so many things to do!

After Li Zhenhua finished speaking, Li Yun did not insist that he go to Haicheng, as she also had her own thoughts.

As the year draws to a close, things at the company get even busier, but none of this really concerns him.

It didn't affect him much; he continued to live his life as before!

On the 26th of the month, Li Yun returned home, and after she left, he moved back to the blacksmith's shop.

Once he was home alone, he felt much freer, and with the Lunar New Year approaching, he decided not to go back to the company.

This was the perfect time for him to immerse himself in the virtual laboratory and conduct his own research.

In the laboratory, existing wafers are optimized with the help of analytical tools, using a precision of fifty nanometers.

In his hands, the photolithography knife also played a significant role, but as more and more chip circuit diagrams were drawn...

He gradually developed a sense of aversion to this repetitive work, but when he focused his attention back on the lithography tool in his hand...

He was immediately stunned, as if he had gone astray. Why did he have to carve it by hand?

What's the difference between humans and animals? Humans use tools, while animals don't.

Why doesn't he upgrade the lithography machine from 1 micrometer precision to 0.05 micrometer precision?

A feeling of utter stupidity and wasting so much time washed over him. He then began studying lithography machines.

The half-finished process was erased in the laboratory, and then the purchased micron-scale lithography machine was recreated.

Looking at the original lithography machine that has been reproduced in front of me, I feel like I've wasted a lot of time.

Instead of taking the shortcut, they chose the most difficult path.

As his understanding of lithography machines and chip manufacturing deepened, he gradually realized his own ignorance.

There's a saying: the more you know, the more you realize how ignorant you are, because when you don't know something, it seems very simple to do it.

But as my knowledge increased, I also realized just how difficult the things I had to do were.

Suddenly, I felt incredibly lucky that I was able to create the chip. It was only possible to do so within a virtual laboratory.

If this were to actually happen in real life, let alone creating a chip by hand, just the cleanroom itself would be enough to stump him.

It was after having these thoughts that he gradually lost confidence in the idea of ​​hand-crafting chips.

If we were to actually fabricate a chip in reality, it would be a massive undertaking. The first thing we would need to do is to build a Level 1 cleanroom.

There is still a lot to be done in reality, but given their current size, they simply don't have enough money to build all these things.

From then on, he completely abandoned the idea of ​​hand-crafting chips, because it was simply impossible to achieve in the current reality.

It seems like everything I did in the virtual lab was a waste of time.

However, this also made him realize what the chip industry is. From what he learned, Kyushu still has a long way to go.

Lying in bed, he opened his eyes again, looked at the dark room, sighed, turned over, and fell asleep.

Ding Yan initially thought the two had broken up, but after further questioning, she learned the reason.

Although they weren't married yet, in Ding Yan's eyes, their relationship was already a done deal.

After understanding the reason, they finally let Li Yun go.

During the Spring Festival, people have more free time, and many spend their time at home watching TV series and scrolling through Douyin (TikTok).

It was around this time that the Antarctic team's video, which resembled a movie plot, went viral.

The reason it became popular is quite simple: this time, it started going viral on the internet.

A research team from the United States in Antarctica encountered the same situation as the Kyushu Antarctic team during a scientific research mission.

They faced the same problem of ice breaking apart, but their snowmobiles didn't offer much relief.

There were six snowmobiles in total, but only two made it out.

The other four vehicles, carrying four people each, perished on the broken ice in Antarctica.

After the two remaining people ran back to the research station, they reported the incident.

The videos, which served as evidence, were also submitted to the authorities, and one of the staff members uploaded them online.

An American exchange student in Kyushu, after seeing the video, immediately thought of a video he had seen on Kuaishou and Douyin before.

Two videos, the same situation, but different results, which was hard for the young man to accept at the time.

He then edited the two videos together and posted them on Kuaishou International. The video went viral and was subsequently shared back to Kyushu.

The snowmobile that carried the Kyushu Antarctic expedition team to safety became the focus of attention.

But even after searching everywhere, people couldn't find out which brand the motorcycle was.

Amid people's curiosity, the official website of the Antarctic station suddenly saw a large influx of people, almost all of whom were inquiring about motorcycles.

But it's Chinese New Year now, everyone's on holiday, and no one on the website has answered this question.

And so the matter was put on hold.

Li Zhenhua celebrated the New Year in a very traditional way, keeping the customs the same as when his grandfather was still alive.

After the Lunar New Year, work resumed on the seventh day of the new year, and Li Yun returned on the eighth day.

After that, life returned to normal. The house behind the blacksmith's shop was almost finished, and everything on the outside was installed. All that was left was to do the interior decoration.

The newly built factory area is still under construction, and it is estimated that it will take another three or four months to be fully operational.

After putting aside his obsession with hand-crafting chips, Li Zhenhua devoted all his energy to the manufacturing of aircraft mechanical parts.

As for the flight control and avionics components of model aircraft, we can only purchase readily available chips from the market for research and development.

As time passed, he finally gathered all the materials needed for the model airplane, and then began manufacturing the model airplane engine.

Of all the materials used, the most difficult to produce were those used in the core combustion chamber. After overcoming a series of challenges, these materials were finally developed.

The single-crystal nickel-rhenium-iron alloy in front of him took a lot of effort to create.

Furthermore, he specifically created a controllable magnetic field to align the single crystals of this alloy.

The engine manufacturing process was a complete replication of the laboratory techniques, and the experience accumulated in the virtual laboratory finally came in handy.

The first component manufactured was the engine combustion chamber casing. The engine diameter was reduced to 29 centimeters; his machining center was perfectly capable of producing this casing.

He placed a 40-centimeter-long square single-crystal nickel-rhenium-iron alloy into the machining center. This metal was the new high-temperature alloy that had been smelted previously.

The light screen in front of him showed that the internal stress of the metal block had been almost completely released.

With the help of the Eye of Analysis, he managed to tap out the last bit of internal stress with a rubber mallet.

After placing the metal in place, he pressed the start button, and the cutting head of the machining center began to rotate at high speed, cutting small pieces of metal.

As the cutter head rotates, chips fall from the originally square metal block, and its shape changes as it cuts.

As more and more debris is cut off the metal, it never regains its original shape.

After a day of manufacturing, the upper part of the metal block has been shaped into a circle with holes by the machining center.

In two and a half days, he took a complete combustion chamber casing out of the machining center.

He spent two and a half days at the processing center, constantly monitoring the machines.

The machined casing was taken out and set aside for later use. Then, the impeller, disc and other parts in the combustion chamber were manufactured.

Machining the wheel is relatively simple, but machining the impeller blades is more difficult.

Because the machining center he's currently using doesn't meet his precision requirements, he can only use it to create a rough blank.

After that, he took out the rough blank, fixed it in a vise, and then manually rubbed it with a file.

One blade at a time was rolled out in his hands, and the rolled-out blades were then loaded onto the impeller disk.

When installing it onto the impeller, the dynamic balance of the impeller was already a concern.

His eyes and hands are no joke either; maintaining balance is just a minor issue for him.

The turbojet engine was also gradually taking shape as it was being manufactured.

Time slipped away quietly as he built the engine. After more than a month of work, he finally finished it by hand.

At this moment, in the center of the workshop, he stood next to an iron frame, on which was the turbojet engine that had already been manufactured.

(End of this chapter)