46: Chapter 46 See you in one minute

The next evening, Jiang Lin welcomed his first batch of heavy weapons.

Well, calling them heavy weapons, they were actually just steel plates, round steel, a vise, and a bunch of standard parts.

But for someone about to enter the Wasteland alone for forty years, they were indeed closer to weapons than any model gun.

They could fight against entropy, wear and tear, sandstorms, and loneliness.

An Iveco box truck, sprayed with the green paint of a certain intercity logistics company, wheezingly squeezed into the narrow alley behind the teachers' building.

The car door pushed open, and an older fellow jumped down.

This fellow was broad and fat, holding a half-crushed Red Bull can in his hand, his face written all over with the irritability of life is so tiring, I want to get off work.

"Are you Mr. Jiang with the tail number 7749?"

The fat driver checked his phone screen, looked up at Jiang Lin, who was wearing a blue and white school uniform, and his brows instantly knitted together into a knot.

"It's me, driver, please just unload at the entrance of this rolling door."

Jiang Lin walked forward and handed over a bottle of Oriental Leaf tea he had just bought from the grocery store nearby.

The fat driver took the water, his expression softened a bit, but he still couldn't help complaining.

"How much is the shipping fee for your order anyway? Not only is it heavy as hell, but it's also full of irregular iron lumps. I almost sprained my back carrying them."

For the next five minutes, the two of them began unloading the goods.

The packages were wrapped in three layers inside and outside with greasy woven bags and thick cardboard.

The first to be dragged out was the cast iron vise ordered from Old Yu.

As soon as Jiang Lin reached out to take it, his arms suddenly sank downwards, and the ligaments in his wrists instantly tightened.

This was completely different from lifting a twenty-kilogram dumbbell in the gym.

The weight of the dumbbell was even, and it had an ergonomic grip.

But the center of gravity of this vise packed in a broken carton was entirely on one side, and the edge of the carton dug into Jiang Lin's palm like a dull knife.

"Be careful, if it smashes your instep, it's on you." The fat driver lent a hand from above.

Followed closely were cut-to-size Q235 carbon steel plates, a bundle of round steel of various diameters, a few thick aluminum blocks used as shims, power system components, data boxes, moisture-proof boxes, and finally two heavy wooden boxes containing fasteners of various specifications and those small tools bought from Old Yu's shop.

The logistics truck roared, backed out of the alley, and drove away.

Jiang Lin stood in place, looking at the small mountain of iron piled in front of the door, and shook his slightly sore arms.

He pulled down the rolling shutter door halfway, leaving a height of less than half a meter for ventilation, and then turned around to turn on the dim yellowish incandescent lamp overhead.

Unpacking.

Peeling away layers of anti-rust paper and bubble wrap, that old but heavy Japanese-made vise finally revealed its true appearance.

The dark green primer was mottled and peeling off, revealing the dark gray cast iron texture inside. The lead screw was coated with a thick layer of grease, exuding a pungent industrial scent.

"It can't be placed directly on the angle iron shelf; the shelf is too thin and cannot withstand the vibration of the vise during cutting."

He looked around, and his eyes fell on an abandoned solid wood door core board, which he had picked up from the garbage pile by the road yesterday, originally intending to use it as a footrest.

He dragged the door core board over, placed it between the two angle iron shelves, and used the bought expansion screws and corner brackets to fix this heavy wooden board in the corner of the wall, making a simple but extremely stable workbench.

Then, he took a deep breath, hugged the base of the vise with both hands, exerted strength from his waist, gave a grunt, and moved it onto the workbench.

He used two C-clamps to press the door core board onto the angle iron shelf, placed a layer of old rubber under the base of the vise, and then temporarily clamped the vise down with two perforated angle steels and long screws.

He shook it hard.

It wasn't as motionless as imagined.

The vise and the wooden board made a dull shaking sound together.

Very small, but it existed.

This was not a qualified workbench; it could only barely withstand sawing and light filing.

Jiang Lin recorded this shaking into the logbook.

[The rigidity of the temporary workbench is insufficient. In the Wasteland, this structure must not be used as a long-term benchmark.]

With the base ready, the next step was the first trial and error.

Jiang Lin rummaged out a piece of Q235 flat steel two fingers wide and five millimeters thick from the carton, inserted it into the jaws, and turned the crank to clamp it tightly.

Then he took out a brand-new hand steel saw frame, unpacked a high-carbon steel saw blade that the boss said was cheap, followed the direction learned from the video with the teeth facing forward, installed it into the saw frame, and tightened the wing nut.

"Let's get to work."

He first put on safety goggles, rolled up the cuffs of his down jacket tightly, and put away the excess screws and saw blades on the workbench.

The surface of the Q235 steel plate still had factory anti-rust oil on it. He casually took a rag and wiped the place to be sawed hard a few times, so that later oil stains mixed with iron filings wouldn't fill up the saw teeth and cause slipping.

Only then did he stand in front of the workbench, pressed the front end of the saw frame with his left hand, gripped the handle with his right hand, leaned forward, pressed the saw blade onto the flat steel, and pushed forward.

Squeak——

A sharp metal scraping sound echoed in the small garage.

The saw blade did not cut in, but slid off along the smooth surface of the steel plate, leaving a shallow white mark on it.

Jiang Lin was stunned for a moment.

Watching masters on the internet saw metal, it was as smooth as cutting tofu, why did the metal become so stubborn in his own hands?

He recalled Old Yu's teachings and the theories in books.

"The starting saw angle is too small, and there is no thumb guidance."

He readjusted his posture, pressed his left thumb against the side of the saw blade as a guide, tilted the saw blade by about fifteen degrees, pulled it gently a few times, and rubbed out a small notch on the edge of the steel plate.

With this notch for positioning, he began to increase the force and push forward.

Clank, clank.

The saw teeth finally bit into the metal.

Jiang Lin was overjoyed in his heart, subconsciously accelerated his speed, and his arms began to twitch back and forth violently. To be fast, he was also continuously applying downward pressure.

Suddenly, with a crisp snap.

The saw frame suddenly loosened, and Jiang Lin's hand hit the edge of the vise heavily, hurting him so much that he gasped a breath of cold air.

When he recovered from the pain and looked closely, that brand-new high-carbon steel saw blade broke into two halves from the middle, and the fracture showed jagged gray crystalline shapes.

Jiang Lin slightly frowned, removed the broken saw blade, and examined it carefully under the light.

"Excessive force, coupled with the distortion of the saw frame during the pushing process, lateral stress led to breakage."

The saw bow was not ability, the saw blade was not ability, and the vise was not ability either.

They were just things that made mistakes clearer.

If there were no broken saw blade, he wouldn't even know his first kind of error was called lateral stress.

Thinking of this, he picked up his phone, opened the [Tool Wear Log], and began to record.

[Test item: Manual sawing of Q235 steel.]

[Wear: High-carbon steel saw blade x1.]

[Cause analysis: Beginner's obsessive-compulsive disorder, excessive downward pressure, reciprocating frequency too fast without giving the metal time to chip, saw frame side deflection occurred.]

After writing these down, he replaced it with a bimetallic saw blade.

This time, he was no longer impatient for quick success.

Standing with one foot in front of the other, his center of gravity on the front foot, he used the inertia of his body to push the saw frame.

Push, with force.

Return, relax.

Scrape, scrape, scrape.

The sound became regular, and tiny iron filings fluttered down from the saw cut like gray snowflakes, falling on the base of the vise.

It took a full fifteen minutes before that piece of flat steel finally dropped to the ground with a clatter.

Jiang Lin looked at his red palms and knuckle joints that had turned white from gripping hard, his breathing somewhat heavy.

He took a towel to wipe the sweat on his forehead, and muttered to himself softly: "It consumes too much physical strength."

In the Real World, when tired, he could eat a bowl of high-calorie beef noodles to replenish energy, or simply order takeout.

But in the Wasteland, the calories consumed by fifteen minutes of high-intensity sawing might require him to eat several potatoes to make up for it.

If energy intake could not keep up, muscles would atrophy, movements would deform, and the error rate would rise exponentially.

"On the next trip to the Wasteland, I still need to put a lot of effort into farming."

With the lesson of sawing, Jiang Lin held great awe for filing.

He reclamped the sawed-off flat steel with rough edges, and picked a large half-round file from the old files given by Old Yu.

The wooden handle of the file was polished very smooth, seemingly still carrying the temperature memory of the original owner.

Jiang Lin recalled the illustrations about filing posture in "Basics of Fitting", holding the handle with his right hand and gently pressing the front end of the file with his left hand.

Push forward.

Screee——

On the first try, the file bounced violently on the metal surface, making an unpleasant trembling sound.

Plow grooves of varying depths were filed onto the surface.

"The force is uneven."

He took a deep breath, forced himself to slow down. When his right hand pushed, the pressure of his left hand gradually decreased. When the file was almost at the end, his right hand pressed down accordingly.

He imagined a perfect horizontal plane in his mind, trying to make the file slide on these two virtual tracks.

Ten back-and-forth strokes.

Fifty back-and-forth strokes.

One hundred back-and-forth strokes.

...

The garage became stuffy, and Jiang Lin took off his down jacket, wearing only a long-sleeved T-shirt.

Sweat flowed down his cheeks into his neck, and a burning pain came from the web of his right hand.

He stopped his hand and blew away the iron powder on the surface of the steel plate.

The originally jagged saw cut was filed into a relatively smooth surface.

Jiang Lin took out a brand-new 90-degree knife-edge square from the moisture-proof box—a precision measuring tool bought with a lot of money.

He pressed the inside of the square tightly against the datum surface of the steel plate, and then looked at the gap between the square and the filed surface against the light overhead.

The light stubbornly penetrated through the gap.

Less light passed through the middle, and more light passed through both sides.

"The middle is raised, turning into an arc surface."

Jiang Lin sighed and put the square back into the box.

This was the huge chasm between theory and practice.

The books said to keep it horizontal, but the human arm was a multi-jointed lever system. During the pushing process, the wrist would instinctively draw an arc, which led to the filed surface being high in the middle and low at both ends.

This could not be solved by watching a few videos; it could only be corrected by tens of thousands of times of muscle memory.

He recorded this error again in the log.

For the next half month, Jiang Lin lived an extremely fragmented dual life.

During the day, sitting in the classroom of Senior Three Class One, he was the top student in the city who could quickly give the optimal solution no matter how difficult the questions were.

The teachers of various subjects looked at him as if they were looking at a living Buddha who could bring the golden body of enrollment rates.

As soon as the school bell rang, Jiang Lin put on his schoolbag and plunged headfirst into that small garage of the old teachers' building.

The moment the rolling shutter door was pulled down, that genius top student Jiang Lin in the eyes of teachers and classmates instantly vanished, turning into a clumsy and stubborn Wasteland vanguard struggling to grope amidst metal powder and engine oil smells.

He scrapped five saw blades, and four blisters formed on his hands. Among them, the one on the web of his right hand broke and scabbed over and over again, turning into a hard layer of calluses.

When the February monthly exam results came out, he scored 738, even better than the first mock exam.

Old Liu completely set his mind at ease.

When the countdown for the fifth transmission reached the last two days, Jiang Lin stopped all work on hand.

According to categories A to J on the final verified list, these supplies were repacked and boxed.

On the outside of each box, the serial number and category label were written with a waterproof marker, and a layer of wide tape was applied for waterproofing.

Inside the box, a laminated paper catalog was definitely placed on top, clear at a glance.

The classification of the power system was the most cumbersome.

Each wire was not only measured for line resistance, but also marked with different colors of electrical insulation tape at the ends, and labeled with high-temperature resistant labels.

Each backup battery had its terminals protected with foam and insulation tape, and the outer packaging recorded the initial voltage, internal resistance, purchase date, and test load.

In future days, these data would be the life-saving straw for judging battery life.

As for those inconspicuous standard parts, Jiang Lin showed a nearly paranoid obsessive-compulsive disorder.

He unpacked every box of purchased screws and nuts, poured them onto white paper, and checked them one by one with a magnifying glass under a desk lamp.

Looking to see if defective products of other specifications were mixed in, and whether there was minor factory-originated rust on the thread surface.

After confirming correctness, they were re-packaged into thickened sealed bags according to the standard of 50 per bag, vacuum-sealed.

Those precision measuring tools, vernier calipers, micrometers...

were put into a second-hand airtight moisture-proof box acquired from a photography forum, stuffed with two large packs of color-changing silica gel desiccant.

On the workbench, an old canvas rag thoroughly soaked in anti-rust oil was carefully wrapping those edged old files given by Old Yu, as well as his newly bought high-speed steel taps and dies.

In this small garage, every single thing had its absolute rational position before entering the storage box.

Every position had a corresponding and clear record in that black leather ledger.

Time quietly slipped away in this day-after-day repetition and preparation.

Until the early morning of March 4th.

Jiang Lin had quietly gotten up and washed up at five o'clock, quietly going out.

Making a circle, he came into the small garage.

[00:00:45]

Time was running out.

Jiang Lin stood in the center of the garage, surrounded by a circle of supply boxes.

To ensure that the transmission judgment could cover all supplies, he used several nylon ropes to string the handles of all the boxes together, and finally wrapped the main knot tightly around his wrist.

The countdown jumped at the edge of his vision.

[00:00:03]

[00:00:02]

[00:00:01]

"See you in a minute."

He said softly to himself in a calm tone.