44: Chapter 44 The Fifth Forty-Year Scale List

Jiang Lin stared at the [Fifth Wasteland Supplies Checklist] on the screen.

The table was filled with fitting tools and measuring tools.

If shown to a handmade craft enthusiast, this was already an astonishing checklist.

But in Jiang Lin's eyes, this list was too thin.

It wasn't that there were few things; the logic was too thin.

The current state of this table was like a hotheaded kid who had just been stimulated by the four characters of mechanical processing, getting carried away and stuffing every file and bench vise he could think of into his shopping cart all at once, then feeling immensely pleased with himself, thinking he had conjured up an industrial system with his bare hands.

However, the fifth Wasteland was neither a weekend interest class nor a metalworking internship workshop in university.

In reality, if a tool broke, one could borrow one from an old master; if a drill bit snapped, one could go to the warehouse to fill out a form for a new one; if the lead screw of a bench vise stripped its threads, one could report it for repair.

But in the Wasteland, he only had himself.

Moreover, it was very likely to be forty years.

The phrase "forty years" was just three lightweight words falling onto paper, but in Jiang Lin's Wasteland career, it was a slow, irreversible collapse.

It was the scale of equipment aging, the scale of battery degradation; the scale of plastic embrittlement, rubber cracking, metal corrosion, paper dampness, interface oxidation, and dark spots on the screen spreading like a virus.

He remembered that in its tenth year, the fan of that second-hand laptop let out a desperate roar, and dark spots at the edges of the screen spread like a plague. Like caring for a patient on the verge of breathing their last, he would shut it down in a hurry every time he finished looking up information.

He remembered that swollen power bank whose casing had been forced open with a grim white edge, prompting him to throw it overnight into the gravel pit outside the Stone House, terrified that it would explode into a ball of fire while he slept.

The solar panels had been ground into frosted glass by the wind and sand, and the storage battery's voltage was like a drying well, getting shallower year by year.

This fear of having civilization stripped away bit by bit by time was deeply engraved in his bones.

Jiang Lin directly closed the old, loophole-filled table and created a new document.

He renamed it.

[Fifth Wasteland: Closed-System Construction Ledger for Over Forty Years]

His fingers tapped on the keyboard, typing out eight lines of red-highlighted bold text at the very top.

[One, all electronic devices must be treated as consumable parts with limited lifespans; they are strictly forbidden from being regarded as permanent assets.]

[Two, critical systems must strictly enforce three-tier redundancy: primary, backup, and sealed storage.]

[Three, any supplies prone to wear, breakage, contamination, or failure must be estimated in three stages: high wear during the newbie period, low wear during the long-term period, and sealed backup for critical components.]

[Four, data must possess dual lifelines of electronic and paper formats.]

[Five, the power system must allow for degraded operation; a single failure must never cause total paralysis.]

[Six, tools are not better the more there are; they must be maintainable, classifiable, and countable.]

[Seven, do not buy unique items. Unique items equal time bombs.]

[Eight, core objective: rebuild the baseline power system and build a foundational tool library for measurement, processing, and experimentation.]

After typing the last word, Jiang Lin felt this looked somewhat proper.

He had to build a micro-logistics system capable of self-circulation and self-degradation for his future self, who would survive alone in the Wasteland wilderness for forty years.

But merely sitting in the room and daydreaming was not enough.

Looking at the gradually subdivided column of fitting consumables on the screen, his perception of the wear rate in his mind was still somewhat vague.

He needed to touch real things to ground this suspended checklist in reality.

Jiang Lin grabbed his jacket, stuffed his phone into his pocket, and pushed open the door to go out.

Greeting his parents who were watching TV in the living room and simply saying he was going for a walk nearby to buy some stationery, Jiang Lin went downstairs, mounted his bicycle, and headed straight for the Chengnan Mechanical and Electrical Hardware Wholesale Market.

Compared to the shopping malls in the city center, the Chengnan Mechanical and Electrical Market was completely a different world.

Rows of stalls stood closely together, and standard parts such as whole boxes of bolts and gaskets were neatly stacked at the entrances.

Jiang Lin walked into a stall named Hongfa Mechanical and Electrical.

The interior was a bit dim, and the shelves were densely packed with all kinds of cutting tools and measuring tools.

The boss was a fat man in his fifties, leaning on a reclining chair with a cigarette pinched between his fingers, loudly playing short videos with the speakerphone on, without even lifting his eyelids.

Jiang Lin walked up to the counter and tapped the glass surface with his fingers: "Boss, get me two hundred hand-use high-speed steel saw blades. I also want five sets of M3 to M10 tap sets, and separately, another twenty individual taps for M3, M4, and M5 each."

The music from the short video finally stopped.

The boss finally moved his gaze away from the screen and glanced at Jiang Lin.

"Young man, are you planning to open a hardware store in your dorm? Two hundred saw blades can't be eaten like dough twists, can they?"

The boss exhaled a ring of smoke, his tone carrying a hint of banter.

Jiang Lin's expression didn't change as he casually spun an extremely smooth lie: "These are consumables for the school's Engineering Training Center. Teacher Lu asked me to run this errand. He said our hands are clumsy, and the wear and tear on saw blades and taps are high, so we should prepare more to avoid running back and forth."

"What's being clumsy? Last month, someone even twisted an M4 tap off inside a blind hole and ran over to buy a tap extractor from me. That hole was already ruined, what good is a tap extractor?"

Hearing this, the boss laughed out loud, sat up straight from the reclining chair, and flicked the ash off his cigarette.

"The ordinary high-carbon steel ones are cheap, while the bimetallic ones are a bit more expensive but durable. Which kind do you actually want?"

"Take more of the cheap ones, and also take twenty bimetallic ones to seal and store."

The boss nodded and turned to rummage through the depths of the shelves.

Jiang Lin stood in place, but his heart suddenly sank because of the boss's casual remark just now.

Twisting a tap off inside a hole.

When he used to watch video tutorials, the veteran masters seemed to have all sorts of unique skills for removing broken taps.

But the reality was that taps themselves were high-hardness brittle materials. Once they got stuck and broke inside, trying to drill them out with an ordinary drill bit was harder than ascending to heaven.

If it were in the Wasteland, and he was processing a crucial transmission part, just about to finish it, only for the tap to break during the final threading cut...

That wouldn't just be a matter of ruining a single part.

That was a blocking accident in the long river of forty years that could cause his entire project progress to stall.

At this thought, Jiang Lin quickly shouted toward the boss's back: "Boss, add another ten taps each for M4 and M5. Do you have tap extractors? Get me two sets of those as well."

The boss rummaged out a few tap extractors from under the counter, casually tossed them into the bag, and slanted a look at him: "Don't treat this thing as a lifesaver. For M6 and above, you can sometimes give it a try; when M3 and M4 break inside, most of the time you can just consider that piece of material ruined. If you really want to break fewer taps, what you rely on isn't a tap extractor, but making sure the pilot hole isn't too small, backing off half a turn every two twists, clearing chips, applying oil, and keeping your hand steady."

Jiang Lin didn't reply, just secretly keeping these words in mind.

The boss arranged the items one by one on the counter.

The saw blades were stacked into four piles, the tap sets were lined up in a row, and the individually packaged spare taps were put into a small plastic bag by themselves.

Jiang Lin inspected them piece by piece.

He checked the saw blades for rust spots on the cutting edges, unpacked the taps to see if the cutting edges had any chipping, and held the clamp jaws of the tap extractors up to the light to see if the bite was tight.

Not a single step was skipped.

After checking, he pointed to the cardboard box in the corner.

Inside the cardboard box were some scraps like motors, slide rails, and bearings.

"Boss, are these, are these things for sale?"

The boss was stunned: "Your school still wants this kind of junk?"

"Take them apart for fun, to see the internal structure." Jiang Lin's expression didn't change.

"Scrap iron price, pick whatever you want, two yuan a catty."

Jiang Lin squatted down and rummaged through the oil-stained scrap bin.

He picked out a few waste bearings of different specifications, a section of linear guide rail, and a broken stepper motor.

In other people's eyes, these things were trash, but in Jiang Lin's eyes, these were live textbooks that could be dissected without paying any real price.

Observing how shafts were fitted into holes, how springs returned to position, and how guide rails constrained degrees of freedom.

Not long after coming out of Hongfa Mechanical and Electrical, Jiang Lin stopped at the doorway of a store hanging a sign that read Old Yu's Tool Shop carrying two woven bags.

The shop door was narrow, but the inside was very deep. The shelves were densely packed with various measuring tools, cutting tools, and clamping tools, and a piece of aluminum material being processed was clamped on the workbench against the wall.

The boss was an old man in his sixties, wearing a washed-out blue work uniform, grinding an old file with an oilstone.

"Master, do you have any bench vises for sale?"

Old Yu raised his head and looked him up and down.

"What are you using it for?"

"To practice fitting."

Old Yu put the file in his hand aside, walked behind the counter, and bent down to laboriously carry out a heavy small bench vise from underneath.

The vise body had obvious signs of use, but the lead screw turned smoothly, the jaws bit tightly, and the base still had four undrilled mounting holes.

"Japanese made, used for more than ten years, the lead screw hasn't stripped, and the jaw quenching is still there. If you want it, take it for a hundred; a new one is at least three hundred upwards."

Jiang Lin took it, not rushing to pay, but instead turning the bench vise over to check the casting texture on the bottom and whether there were cracks in the mounting holes, and then repeatedly opening and closing the jaws to feel the clearance of the lead screw.

He tightened it to the maximum, held it against the light to check the parallelism of the jaws, and finally gently touched the chamfers along the edges of the jaws with his fingers.

Old Yu watched from behind the counter and nodded slightly.

"Young man, have you studied this before?"

"Not yet, currently learning." Jiang Lin put the bench vise back on the counter.

Old Yu was silent for a moment, picked up an old flat file from beside the workbench, and handed it over.

The wooden handle of the file had been polished to a shine, but the file teeth were still relatively intact, and the cutting edge had no obvious chipping or breaking.

"If you don't mind these retired old files, take them to practice with. Don't rush to use new files; practice getting your strength right on scrap material first. Nine out of ten new files given to a beginner will be ruined."

Jiang Lin took the file and tried holding the wooden handle with his hand to test the grip feel.

The wooden handle of this file had been ground by Old Yu into an arc that fit the palm of the hand, and holding it was more comfortable than any new file.

"Thank you, Master."

"Don't thank me. I can't teach you hand-in-hand anymore, but giving you a few things is something I can still do." Old Yu turned around and rummaged out a small iron box from the drawer. Opening it, inside were a few broken drill bits and a few old taps.

"These are things from my early years that got blunted or chipped and I couldn't bear to throw away. Take them back and study them. Look at what the chipped edge looks like, what angle it chipped at, and why it chipped. A person who truly knows how to work can see the tricks of the trade just by looking at waste items."

Jiang Lin took the iron box with both hands, opened it, and glanced inside.

The damage pattern of each cutting tool was different.

Some had chipped cutting tips, some had rolled cutting edges, and one drill bit had swarf burned to a blue-black color embedded in its spiral flutes.

These weren't trash; they were the mistakes Old Yu had made with his own hands over several decades, his unwritten work logs.

"Master, let me ask you one more thing. When tapping with a tap, if it breaks inside, what other methods are there besides a tap extractor?"

Old Yu didn't answer immediately.

He picked up an M5 tap on the counter and gestured at an angle.

"Anything below M4, if it breaks in a blind hole, is basically hopeless. Above M5, if the break isn't too deep, you can try gently striking it backward with a chisel; if you're lucky, it might loosen out. But truly breaking fewer taps doesn't rely on the skill of taking them out, but on the skill before they break."

He raised a finger, and his voice suddenly rose.

"Don't make the pilot hole too small, especially for aluminum and copper materials—they're soft and prone to sticking to the tool, so the pilot hole needs to be a bit larger than for steel. When tapping, go forward two turns and back off half a turn to clear chips. The tap must not be crooked; once it's crooked, the chips get jammed on one side, getting tighter the further down it goes, and in the end, it will either chip or break. Also, don't skimp on the oil."

Jiang Lin silently recited these words twice in his heart.

"Thank you."

When paying before leaving, Old Yu stuffed another half-used roll of anti-rust paper into his hands.

"Wipe the files clean after use and wrap them in this. A ghost place like Jiangcheng is so humid in summer that even the file teeth can grow rust."

...

After returning home, Jiang Lin began making the ledger.

He took out a brand-new hardcover ledger, weighed and photographed the waste and old parts bought today with an electronic scale, and entered them one by one.

Each item was placed on grid paper, clearly photographed from three angles—front, side, and bottom—with a mobile phone, and then recorded in the ledger with its serial number, item name, purchase source, weight, surface condition, and preliminarily judged usability.

After finishing these, he opened Douyin and clicked on Teacher Lu's direct message.