Chapter 178 Growing Fiberglass in a Greenhouse

"Alrighty!"

Li Yaozhai was a ruthless man. Since the boss had given the order, he would just do it!

Whoosh—!

A large flame flashed by.

The metal clip used to restrict local technology was ruthlessly cut off by the gas cutting torch, falling to the ground with a clang.

Immediately after, the soldering iron in Li Yaozhai's hand accurately tapped the circuit board twice.

Short-circuit, bypass the detection.

Powering it back on.

"Beep—" A long sound rang out.

The red speed limit warning light that had been flashing on the control panel instantly went out.

Replacing it was the green indicator light representing full-power operation.

The numbers on the digital display jumped frantically.

It broke through the shackle of 400 directly.

It surged all the way up, finally settling steadily at 1000!

"It's unlocked!"

Li Yaozhai wiped the sweat from his forehead, grinned, and revealed a mouthful of white teeth: "That feels so damn good!"

Chen Guangwei watched, dumbfounded.

These people... are they this wild?

Resorting to physical hacking at the slightest disagreement?

But before he could be happy for too long, new problems followed one after another.

The machine was running, but the environment wasn't up to par.

This factory building was a red brick structure built in the 50s.

The windows were drafty, the wall plaster was peeling off, and the floor was covered in years of accumulated dust.

Li Yaozhai just tried turning on the fan.

Whoosh— The dust on the floor was whipped up, dancing in the sunlight like a sandstorm.

"Stop! Hurry, stop!"

Li Yaozhai immediately shut it down and waved his hands repeatedly, "Manager Lin, it's impossible to produce anything in this environment."

"High-modulus glass fiber has extremely high requirements for cleanliness."

"If a single speck of dust adheres to it, the drawn fiber will be full of burrs, and the strength will be cut in half."

A technician nearby asked: "Then what do we do? Build a clean room?"

"That would cost hundreds of thousands, and we'd have to import purification equipment from abroad. It would take at least half a year."

Half a year? It would be too late by then.

The workers watching the fun at the door also whispered among themselves.

The machine had finally managed to run, but now it was defeated by the dilapidated building.

Lin Xi stood in the center of the workshop, his gaze sweeping over the drafty windows and the dusty floor.

His line of sight passed through the large door and landed on a corner of the factory grounds in the distance.

There was a vegetable patch cultivated by the employees themselves.

To have fresh vegetables to eat during the winter, the workers had built several simple greenhouses using bamboo poles and plastic sheets, growing cucumbers and tomatoes inside.

A flash of inspiration struck Lin Xi, and the corners of his mouth curled into a meaningful arc.

"Old Chen." Lin Xi pointed in that direction.

Chen Guangwei looked in the direction he was pointing, completely confused: "What is it, Manager Lin?"

"Go buy plastic sheets." Lin Xi said something shocking, "Get the thickest kind of agricultural greenhouse film, and buy a few truckloads of timber."

"Huh?"

"We don't have time to build a clean room, but we can build a greenhouse."

Lin Xi used his toe to draw a circle on the dusty concrete floor, enclosing the production line inside, "Right here in this large factory building, we'll build a room within a room."

Chen Guangwei was stunned for a full three seconds. Then he slapped his thigh hard, his eyes shining brightly: "I get it! A plastic greenhouse!"

"This move is brilliant!"

Over the next twenty-four hours, the Haiwei fishing tackle factory staged a spectacle in industrial history.

There was no high-end purification engineering team. There were only over a hundred workers wearing old cotton-padded jackets, carrying timber and dragging huge rolls of transparent plastic, busy in the workshop.

Using timber for the frame and plastic sheets for the walls, a huge, transparent "plastic house" rose up within the dilapidated red brick factory building.

To solve the sealing problem, all the seams were heat-sealed with electric irons and then covered with three layers of tape.

On the floor, Chen Guangwei found old sacks, sprayed them with water, and flattened them out, covering the concrete floor to prevent dust from rising.

As for the constant temperature? Several sets of discarded cast-iron radiators from the factory were moved inside. They actually managed to heat this plastic space to a constant 25 degrees.

The next evening, the setting sun shone in through the broken windows, and the huge plastic greenhouse emitted an eerie luster.

It looked incredibly rustic. It even had a bit of a cyberpunk absurdity to it.

But the temperature and humidity gauge hanging inside had readings so stable that it made one want to cry.

"Will this work?" An old worker peered inside through the plastic sheet, his heart drumming with anxiety.

"Whether it works or not, we'll know once we try."

Lin Xi, Chen Guangwei, and Li Yaozhai changed into clean white Dacron work clothes and walked into this plastic greenhouse.

Chen Guangwei was so nervous his palms were covered in sweat. "Turn it on!"

Following Lin Xi's order. Hum—

The silver-white glass liquid passed through the spinneret, instantly turning into extremely fine filaments that were almost invisible to the naked eye.

Because the rotation speed was extremely high, the winding shaft almost became a blur.

In the moist, warm, and dust-free plastic greenhouse, those fibers, ten times thinner than a human hair, flowed down like a waterfall and rapidly wound onto the spool.

No broken filaments. No burrs. Crystal clear, emitting a cold industrial luster.

One minute. Five minutes. Ten minutes. The machine ran stably without any alarms.

The first roll of finished product came off the line. Chen Guangwei gently cut off a section.

He took out a micrometer to measure the diameter and then attached weights to perform a simple tensile test.

Everyone held their breath. Only the roar of the machine echoed.

A few minutes later, Chen Guangwei suddenly looked up. "It worked..."

His voice was hoarse, but it carried a heart-wrenching ecstasy. "It really worked!"

"This strength is even better than the imported goods we used before!"

"We made it!"

Boom—! The workers outside the greenhouse erupted into deafening cheers.

In this simple shed built with plastic sheets and wooden strips. On this machine whose technology had been locked down by foreigners.

The Chinese people used the most rustic method to create world-class materials.

The barrage in the Streamer's chat room was also refreshing frantically:

【Holy crap! Is this the legendary "agricultural heavy metal"? I'm growing cucumbers in a greenhouse, and the Streamer is growing glass fiber in a greenhouse? This style is too disjointed!】

【Red brick house, plastic sheets, radiators, creating world-class materials—this is what you call hardcore manufacturing!】

【Foreigners would never imagine in their wildest dreams that the Chinese, in order to produce, could move a "vegetable greenhouse" into a factory.】

【Don't laugh, those in front, many miracles in military industry in history were created just like this! Back then, they used abacuses to build nuclear bombs; now, they use greenhouses to make glass fiber. This is our "indigenous" black technology, specially designed to cure all sorts of defiance!】

Lin Xi stood in the greenhouse, looking at those silver filaments. He knew that this was just the first step.