67: Chapter 67 Recursive Wasteland: From Manual to Machined

Six o'clock sharp.

The yellow light of the incandescent bulb in the small garage vanished.

The city sounds by Jiang Lin's ear were instantly cut off.

Immediately, the sound of the wind filled his ears.

The sixth Wasteland began.

When he left last time, time was frozen here, and inside the Stone House, everything remained as it was at the exact moment of his departure.

Inside the stove were grayish-white cinder residues, and the walls were covered with dense formulas.

The twenty-seven volumes of Wasteland notes were still placed in numerical order beneath the north wall, their linen covers gleaming with a dull rust red.

The low-frequency vibration of the old wind turbine transmitted in from outside the Stone House, mixed with periodic metallic friction sounds.

However, there was no immediate danger of it going out of control; he could process the supplies first.

Inside the [Core Materials and Survival Box], the top layer was not books, but laminated data sheets.

Jiang Lin took out these papers one by one and divided them into three piles: for immediate use, short-term use, and long-term preservation.

The second one opened was the [Power Box].

The heaviest was that set of forty-eight-volt lithium iron phosphate batteries.

He first took out the thermometer to measure the internal temperature of the battery box.

Minus twelve degrees Celsius, not a suitable temperature for direct charging.

Lithium iron phosphate batteries were more stable than many lithium battery systems, but stability did not equal invincibility.

Rashly charging under low temperatures could cause problems at the negative electrode interface, drop the capacity, and in severe cases, bury hidden dangers of internal short circuits.

He moved the battery pack to the inner side of the Stone House close to the stove but away from direct flame exposure, placed wooden boards underneath, and covered it with old cotton cloth on top.

For the [Machining Box], Jiang Lin first checked the tool box.

Nothing was scattered, nothing had collided with each other, and there were no chipped edges.

He used a magnifying glass to check the two smallest sizes of taps, and their cutting edges were intact.

This made him heave a sigh of relief.

[Observation Box].

Inside the plastic box, observation box V5 was placed alone on the top layer; its casing was rough, but it was much neater than the first version.

The sensor area, power area, and data recording area were arranged in layers.

The external probe of the magnetometer was independently packaged with a non-magnetic bracket, and strain relief was applied to the base of the cables.

Beside it were various instruments and materials that looked unremarkable.

But they meant that the Wasteland had a chance to be continuously recorded for the first time, rather than only existing in his subjective memory.

...

Inventorying all five boxes took half an hour.

Before noon, he began cleaning up the machining area.

The machining area left from the fifth time was already very crowded.

A stone table, three old cast-iron surface plates, a handmade wooden rack, and various tools were arranged according to his habits over the past few decades.

These things had once supported him from an almost primitive state, bit by bit establishing micrometer-level planes and wind turbine yaw bearings.

But now, they had to make room for modern machining equipment.

Every old tool was re-numbered; those that could still be used went into the old tool area, and those with severe wear went into the scrap area.

At one o'clock in the afternoon, the bench drill base was finally about to be moved onto the preset workbench on the inner side of the Stone House.

Unfortunately, upon closer inspection, the old wooden beams of the workbench were deformed, with the lower left-rear corner and the slightly warped front-right corner, making it completely unsuitable for directly supporting the bench drill.

When drilling, as long as the base had a tiny wobble, the drill bit would mock the operator with deviated holes, broken drills, and torn hole walls.

A bench drill did not have to stand on an absolute horizontal plane, but it could not stand on a wooden rack that would deform under stress.

Jiang Lin could only think of another way.

In the old scrap pile, there were a few channel steels picked up during the last expedition, along with two thick steel plates.

Previously they were too heavy and cutting them took too much effort, so he had never fully utilized them.

Now, he needed the bench drill to machine the machine base, yet he needed the machine base to install the bench drill.

The solution could only step back to a lower level.

Using an old breast drill and manual scribing, he would first make a temporary transitional machine base capable of bearing the bench drill base.

This was the most common recursion in engineering construction.

First use poor tools to make a good-enough tool that could install good tools, and then use the good-enough tool to make even better tools.

Only then could precision be discussed.

At three o'clock in the afternoon, Jiang Lin put on the passive support exoskeleton.

"Click."

The pawl dropped into the teeth.

A part of his body's weight transferred from his thigh muscles to the metal support rods, and then to the footrests and the ground.

Maintaining a half-squat posture, Jiang Lin began scribing lines on the channel steel.

For thirty minutes, his quadriceps did not experience a continuous burning soreness.

His waist and abdomen still needed to maintain balance, and his ankles also had to participate in stability, but the most agonizing low-position static load was mostly shared away.

The exoskeleton was working normally.

But by the fortieth minute, he discovered a problem.

The release paddle of the upper ratchet on his left leg became slower to rebound under low temperatures.

It should be that after the viscosity of the grease increased, the spring reset speed decreased.

The structure that was completely smooth at over ten degrees Celsius in the Real World garage became sluggish at minus ten-something degrees in the Wasteland.

If he continued to use it, it might be half a beat late during a certain release.

Half a beat was not a big deal on flat ground.

Under a load-bearing state, it was enough to make a person's center of gravity disordered.

Jiang Lin immediately stopped, released the lock, and sat back down on the stone stool.

He disassembled the outer casing of the left leg ratchet.

Sure enough, the internal grease had become stickier.

He did not complain about design errors.

Design errors were inherently a part of equipment debugging, let alone this was not the first lesson the Wasteland had taught Real World equipment.

By evening, the scribing of the temporary machine base materials was completed.

Jiang Lin wiped the exoskeleton clean, hung it back on the wall, and turned on observation box V5 for an indoor self-test.

No garbled code, no crashes, no SD card write failures.

Self-test passed.

True observation would only begin after the power system was stable, the installation coordinates were fixed, and the equipment attitude record was complete.

Otherwise, early data would only pollute the database.

On the second day, the casing of the battery box under the cotton cloth was no longer as freezing-sticky to the hand as last night.

The thermometer showed minus 1.6 degrees Celsius.

Not enough yet.

Lithium iron phosphate batteries could discharge at low temperatures, but low-temperature charging was another matter.

There was no need to take risks to rush progress.

Afterwards, he opened the recording board of the old power system.

The old storage battery left from the fifth time still maintained the most basic lighting of the Stone House, but the voltage had dropped severely.

Last night the wind turbine ran for six hours, and in the morning the open-circuit voltage was only 11.6 volts.

Jiang Lin connected the USB voltage and current recorder to the output end of the old wind turbine, and then connected the temporary load behind the voltage regulation module.

The wind turbine's rotational speed was extremely unstable, and the voltage curve looked like a sine wave squeezed by someone's hand.

Every few tens of seconds, a brief dip would occur.

The dry friction of the yaw bearing was not just a mechanical problem; it had begun to pollute the power system.

When the yaw mechanism jammed and the wind turbine could not smoothly track the wind, the blade angle of attack would deviate from the optimal state in a short time, the rotational speed would slide, and the generator output would drop accordingly.

When the old storage battery was healthy, this fluctuation would be swallowed up by the energy storage system.

Now, the old battery could not swallow it anymore, and it became exposed.

Jiang Lin did not go to repair the wind turbine.

Wind Turbine No. 1 no longer had much repair value, especially since today's core task was the bench drill base.

Without stable hole-machining capability, wind turbine no. 2 was merely a paper proposal.

At 7:40 in the morning, Jiang Lin put on the passive support exoskeleton again and began machining work.

The temporary bench drill base was actually two pieces of old channel steel, a thick steel plate, a few angle brackets used for fixation, and eight M10 bolts.

At noon, he sat at the doorway of the Stone House eating dried potatoes soaked in hot water.

The high-frequency friction sound of the wind turbine was still there.

But after connecting the voltage recorder in the morning, the data would be left behind, and he no longer needed to rely on his ears to memorize it.

This was the meaning of observation equipment.

It did not instantly reveal the truth, but it also spared him from staking everything on his own nervous system.

Before evening, the bench drill column was finally installed.

This bench drill was merely an entry-level device in the Real World.

Placed on a Taobao page, no one would give it a second look.

Yet in the Wasteland, it meant that holes could be repeated, hole spacing could be controlled, perpendicularity had a basic guarantee, and tapping no longer completely relied on the stability of the wrist.

wind turbine no. 2, the sensor bracket, the observation tower, the machine base, the coupling, and the casing all possessed a more reliable starting point for hole machining for the first time.

As night was about to fall, the battery box temperature rose to 5.2 degrees Celsius.

Jiang Lin began a low-current discharge self-test.

The voltage difference was very small, the temperature probe was normal, the balancing lines were normal, and the protection board communication was normal.

He connected a low-power resistive load and discharged it for ten minutes.

The voltage drop was stable with no abnormal heating.

The new battery pack discharge self-test passed.

Beside it, the old wind turbine voltage recorder was still working.

The curve had saved a complete day.

Jiang Lin exported the data to an industrial SD card and drew a simplified diagram on paper.

The low-frequency voltage dip roughly coincided with the rhythm of the yaw friction he heard with his ears.

But without synchronous vibration records or a rotational speed sensor, this could only count as a correlation clue and could not be written as a quantitative conclusion.

It could only be said that the correlation between the old wind turbine output fluctuation and yaw friction preliminarily existed.

Continuous recording for three days was still required.

This reminded him of what Yao Siyu said in the Jiangda University laboratory: "Data divorced from metadata is garbage."

Thus, he completed the metadata.

Wind direction: Northwest.

Wind speed: Estimated moderate, official anemometer not installed.

Old battery: Aged, internal resistance unknown.

Load: Low-power lighting and recorder.

Yaw status: High-frequency friction still exists after temporary repair.

Recording equipment location: Second layer of the energy area wooden rack.

Moved: No.

Automatic restart: None.

After writing these down, the sky had completely darkened.

The light shone on the newly installed bench drill, casting a straight shadow on the wall.

That shadow was very close to Maxwell's equations on the wall.

One was humanity's minimalist expression of electromagnetic fields, and the other was the first machine on the Wasteland capable of stable drilling.

There was no hierarchy between the two.

Formulas explained the world; holes changed the world.

Without holes, wind turbine no. 2 could not be assembled.

Without wind turbine no. 2, the power system could not hold up.

Without the power system, the calculation box would not turn on, the observation box would not be continuous, the database would sleep, and plasma Physics would just be pretty words on paper.

Therefore, the first standard hole was more urgent than a Solar Flare.

After dinner, he opened 《Plasma Physics on his phone.

...

On the morning of the third day, the first thing Jiang Lin did upon waking up was still to check the battery.

11.3 degrees Celsius, he could proceed to the next step.

He put on insulating gloves, opened the battery box casing, and checked the BMS sampling wire harness.

Every single wire was re-confirmed by number.

B1, B2, B3...

The wire harness had not fallen off, the solder joints had not cracked, and the connectors had not loosened due to transportation impact.

He took a multimeter to measure the single-cell voltages sequentially.

The maximum voltage difference did not exceed seven millivolts; this was a good number.

The next step was the DC bus.

Jiang Lin took out the pre-cut red and black cables, cold-pressed terminals, heat shrink tubing, DC circuit breaker, fuse box, and a thick insulating baseplate.

The baseplate had been cut in the Real World ahead of time, with several rows of standard holes drilled to secure electrical components.

Yesterday, when he didn't have a drill press, he still thought this board was ordinary.

Looking at it now, however, he felt it was of extremely high value.

Because these holes came from the stable tools and standard processes of the Real World.

In the Wasteland, every pre-existing standard hole meant that he bore one less risk of broken drills, misaligned holes, and ruined threads.

He fixed the baseplate onto the wooden rack in the energy zone, installing the main circuit breaker first, followed by the fuse box, and then the voltage and current recording module.

Finally, he reserved the inverter input terminal.

All cables entered from the left and exited from the right, with high-voltage and signal lines routed separately, terminals facing the same direction, and numbering labels facing outward.

This was the rule Yin Hang repeatedly emphasized: do not treat being able to conduct electricity as passing.

It was to ensure that himself half a year later, even when exhausted, cold, hypoglycemic, and in poor lighting, could understand at a glance where a wire came from, where it went, and which circuit should be cut if a problem occurred.

The Wasteland would not give you one fewer short circuit just because you were excited while wiring.

At 9:20 AM, the initial installation of the busbar was completed.

Jiang Lin first used a multimeter to check all the way from the battery positive terminal to the inverter input terminal.

With the circuit breaker in the open state, there was no voltage at the backend, and the fuse status was normal.

The grounding terminal temporarily lacked a true sense of earth.

The Stone House in the Wasteland did not have the protective earth wire system found in modern buildings.

However, equipotential bonding had to be made between the metal chassis.

This was not to satisfy standard documents, but to prevent a certain equipment casing from quietly turning into a live trap when the insulation was damaged.

Jiang Lin found a relatively straight galvanized steel bar from the scrap area, scraped off the rust layer, and hammered it into the frozen soil on the leeward side outside the Stone House.

The frozen soil was very hard, and every hammer strike made his wrists numb from the vibration.

When the steel bar was less than half a meter in, it hit stones.

This depth was not ideal.

Formal grounding rods in moist soil shouldn't be fudged so casually like this.

But the Wasteland was dry and cold, and the soil resistance was inherently high; he was not building an industrial plant now, just providing a relatively consistent reference point for static electricity, leakage, and equipment casings.

He connected the reserved grounding points of the inverter chassis, drill press base, and future computing box chassis to the same equipotential bar using yellow-green wires.

After finishing these, it was close to noon.

Jiang Lin stopped to eat something, then proceeded with the inverter test.

The first problem appeared immediately.

There was a large-capacity capacitor inside the input end of the pure sine wave inverter.

If it was connected directly to the 48V battery pack, the instantaneous surge current would be huge, causing arcing at best and burning the contacts at worst.

In the Real World, he had already prepared a pre-charge scheme.

He used a power resistor to slowly charge the inverter input capacitor first, and once the input terminal voltage approached the battery voltage, he closed the main circuit breaker.

Jiang Lin connected the pre-charge resistor into the circuit, and the voltage slowly rose from zero.

47V, close to the battery terminal voltage.

He waited for thirty seconds; there was no abnormal heating, no burnt smell, and no capacitor whining.

Closing the switch.

The DC bus was truly connected for the first time.

The logger screen lit up.

51.6 V, extremely small no-load current, inverter started.

The moment of startup dipped to 48.9 V.

With a beep, the output terminal displayed 220V.

Jiang Lin did not trust the display screen, instead connecting a multimeter and a high-voltage differential isolation probe to check the waveform outline.

The output waveform was close to a sine wave.

The frequency was around 50Hz, with slight clipping at the top of the waveform, but it was acceptable under no-load conditions.

He first connected a low-power bulb load.

The bulb lit up, and the voltage drop was not obvious.

He then connected a small resistive load and ran it for ten minutes.

The inverter casing was slightly warm, and the battery voltage dropped steadily.

The BMS had no alarms.

The next step was the machining area.

The drill press assembled yesterday stood quietly on the temporary base.

It hadn't truly spun yet.

Jiang Lin turned the spindle by hand.

Smooth.

He turned the chuck again.

There was slight resistance, but no obvious sticking points.

Checking the belt tension, it was a bit too tight.

The belt of an entry-level drill press was not some precision transmission part; too tight would forcibly press the radial load onto the spindle bearings, increasing runout and heat generation.

Too loose would cause slipping.

Finding that middle range relied on hand feel and experience.

Jiang Lin installed a dial indicator.

The magnetic base was attached to the drill press workbench, and the indicator probe gently pressed against the outer circumference of the chuck.

Manually rotated the spindle one revolution.

The pointer fluctuated.

Maximum radial runout: 0.043 mm.

Not pretty, but not unexpected.

This was an entry-level drill press, not a jig boring machine.

He pressed the indicator probe onto a clamped standard round bar.

Rotate.

Drill rod end runout: 0.071 mm.

This number was somewhat unsightly.

The chuck taper shank was disassembled again.

Wiped clean.

There was an extremely small metal chip on the tapered surface, stuck by grease.

If not checked, it would make the entire chuck like a flat plate propped up by a grain of sand, forever carrying a little eccentricity.

Jiang Lin wiped the taper shank and taper hole clean with a lint-free cloth, reassembled them, tapped them home, and measured again.

Chuck outer circumference runout: 0.026 mm.

Drill rod end runout: 0.041 mm.

Acceptable.

Before powering on, he kept the drill press switch off and plugged it into the inverter.

After closing the inverter output terminal switch, he pressed the drill press switch.

"Hum—"

The moment the motor started, the DC bus voltage plummeted suddenly.

48.7 V dipped to 45.9 V, and the inverter fan immediately spun up.

The drill press spindle turned for less than two seconds, the inverter alarm light flashed, and the drill press stopped.

Jiang Lin's hand was already pressing on the circuit breaker.

However, there was no smoke, no burnt smell, just overload protection.

Looking at the logger, the peak current at startup significantly exceeded the estimate.

It wasn't a problem with the nominal power rating of the drill press.

The motor starting current could not be explained by steady-state power to begin with, but the peak value was even larger than he had imagined.

There might be three reasons.

First, the inverter margin was insufficient.

Second, the input wire was too long, resulting in excessive voltage drop.

Third, the initial resistance of the drill press belt and spindle was too large.

He first dealt with what he could handle by shortening the inverter input wire.

Originally, it was routed in a detour for neat wiring, but now it took the shortest path directly.

The connectors were re-crimped.

Then he adjusted the drill press belt to the lowest speed gear to reduce the mechanical load and lower the mechanical resistance during the motor ramp-up process after startup.

Pre-charging again, closing the switch again.

Pressing the drill press switch again.

"Hum—"

This time, the motor weathered the startup peak.

The spindle began to rotate steadily.

The sound carried the slight belt vibration and bearing noise typical of entry-level equipment, which didn't sound very pleasant.

The drill press was powered on in the Wasteland for the first time.

Jiang Lin let the drill press run idle for three minutes.

He only started trial drilling after everything was normal.

Taking a piece of scrap steel plate.

Scribing, center punching, center drilling.

The drill press spindle descended, and the center drill bit into the steel plate at a stable speed, providing a stable rotational speed and vertical feed.

The sound was crisp, and the chips were much steadier than when manual cranking.

Thirty seconds later, the drill bit penetrated.

Jiang Lin immediately retracted the tool, stopped the machine, and cleared the chips.

He gently scraped off the burrs with a chamfering tool, then measured the hole diameter with calipers.

5.08 mm.

For this equipment, this piece of scrap steel, and this temporary base, it was completely acceptable.

The second hole, the third hole, and the fourth hole—the four holes were on the same scribe line, with a maximum deviation of 0.18 mm.

This was not breathtaking precision; in a modern machining workshop, it could even be considered ordinary.

But in the Stone House in the Wasteland, on a newly established temporary base, this was an epoch-making number.

Before dusk, Jiang Lin entered the drill press processing data into a paper table, and performed a power supply interference test using the Observation Box V5.

It was just something done in passing.

Unexpectedly, it quickly exposed a problem.

The moment the drill press started, a huge spike appeared in the magnetic field data recorded by the observation box.

The temperature and humidity were normal, and the air pressure was normal, but the magnetometer curve looked as if it had been hit hard by a club.

It wasn't an anomaly in the Wasteland magnetic field.

It was an illusion created together by the drill press motor, the inverter starting current, the DC bus surge, and the cable electromagnetic interference.

Jiang Lin looked at that spike on the screen, lost in thought.

If he hadn't done today's test and had installed the observation box directly next to the Stone House, then on some night in the future, the startup of the drill press, inverter, wind turbine controller, or workstation might leave seemingly mysterious disturbances in the magnetometer records.

Then he might mistakenly believe that was the Wasteland magnetosphere breathing.

It seemed absurd.

But in the history of science, similar absurdities had never been lacking.

Instrument contamination masquerading as natural signals, with humans then using beautiful theories to explain the noise they manufactured with their own hands.

This could be considered today's unexpected harvest.

At night, Jiang Lin briefly opened the computing box for the first time, took out an industrial-grade SD card and a low-power backup mini host, and connected it to the stable power supply stepped down by DC-DC from the new battery.

Upon startup, the Linux system entered the command line and checked a local Git repository.

Repository name: "Outpost_Phase_I"

Inside were: Power wiring diagram.

Equipment numbering table.

Observation box firmware version.

Drill press trial run record.

Battery BMS initial inspection table.

Exoskeleton low-temperature failure record.

Jiang Lin created a new commit.

Commit message.

"Day3: DC bus established, inverter tested, drill press first powered holes completed."

Looking at this line of English, he felt it was a bit comical.

In the Stone House in the Wasteland, facing an oil lamp and blowing sand, recording a drill press drilling holes for the first time using Git.

But Senior Brother Meng was right.

In a low-resource environment, the most terrifying thing wasn't making mistakes; it was not knowing which version the error started from.