Chapter 1941 - Boiling Lacquer

Though Feng Nuo harbored some dissatisfaction that the machinery factory had allocated him only a single fresh graduate from vocational school, he consoled himself with the pragmatic truth: something was better than nothing. The actual work of trial-producing relays demanded far more grunt labor than the comfortable theorizing he'd engaged in during the design phase. Fortunately, most of these tasks required little technical expertise, and a helper—however green—would free up considerable energy for more critical work. As he mentally calculated the project timeline, he remained oblivious to the occasional furtive glances the teenager before him cast toward his office.

For the past two days, Feng Nuo had devoted himself to studying the enameled wire manufacturing documentation Faraday had provided, sacrificing both sleep and meals in the process. The picture that emerged was sobering: Faraday's own experimental production had followed a labyrinth route, employing both modified tung oil and modified raw lacquer. Yet regardless of which formulation was used, the resulting lacquer film exhibited abysmal abrasion resistance, necessitating reinforcement with cotton yarn winding. The product could barely function in motors—and even then, only at the cost of significantly reduced service life.

"Looking at it this way, it doesn't seem too difficult," Feng Nuo murmured, surveying the materials with nascent confidence.

The electrical department had generously contributed several silicon steel sheets purported to be of excellent quality—his first tentative step into the relay manufacturing quagmire. Word of his ambition spread quickly through interested circles. Soon, senators with electronics backgrounds and colleagues from the electrical department descended upon him through letters, telephone calls, and personal visits, each bearing advice and encouragement. For a time, both his residence and office hosted a constant stream of well-wishers, and his motivation swelled accordingly.

Once the project commenced in earnest, Feng Nuo discovered that others in Lingao were already pursuing enameled wire research, though along a different trajectory. The initiative bore the name "Electronic Component Development Group," and its principal was his peer, Xiu Yuxuan.

Xiu Yuxuan came from a communications engineering background. Since the transmigration, he had devoted himself primarily to maintaining Lingao Telecom's computer room—a role that, despite the change in venue, essentially replicated his work from the old timeline.

Recognizing the professional dead-end such maintenance represented, Xiu Yuxuan had leveraged Zhong Lishi's connections to secure a position at the Institute of Electronics under the Ministry of Science and Technology, where he now served as director—though admittedly, a commander without troops.

At the Institute, Director Xiu labored to "restore" various electronic components. In truth, manufacturing such components presented no insurmountable technical challenges; the real bottleneck lay in raw materials, which depended heavily on fine chemicals. This dependency had thus far stymied much of Director Xiu's work.

Upon hearing that someone sought to tackle the formidable challenge of relay production, Director Xiu not only paid a personal visit to exchange insights on project management and computer room maintenance, but also presented Feng Nuo with a collection of technical materials he had specially procured from the Great Library.

After seeing Xiu Yuxuan off, Feng Nuo casually opened the folder. The first item was a mimeographed booklet titled "Simple Method for Manufacturing Enameled Wire." Beneath the title ran a cautionary note: Internal reading material of the Ministry of Science and Technology, pay attention to preservation.

The title alone set off warning bells in Feng Nuo's mind. When he opened to the preface, he found that although much of the period-specific language had been excised, the unmistakable writing style immediately revealed the document's true nature: a so-called "indigenous manufacturing methods" manual.

Feng Nuo's eye twitched involuntarily. Over the past two years, the Manufacturing Commission and the Planning Agency had issued repeated directives to all departments, specifically cautioning technical R&D groups in industrial, technological, and military sectors to employ "indigenous methods" and "simple methods" with extreme circumspection. The warnings emphasized standardization concerns and the elimination of excessively backward technologies. Most critically, they mandated that any use of such crude methods must first undergo small-batch testing—blind scaling to production levels was strictly forbidden.

Yet for him, a thoroughgoing layman, such booklets offered far more accessible instruction than their sophisticated counterparts.

Forget it, make do with what we have, Feng Nuo reasoned. Which enterprise in Lingao didn't begin by replicating indigenous methods? Why should our project conform to old timeline standards from the outset?

The introductory section laid out the fundamentals clearly: "The entire production process of enameled wire comprises several stages: wire drawing, lacquering, baking, and wire collection. Specialized enameled wire coating is applied to clean bare copper wire, then subjected to high-temperature baking at 300-400 degrees Celsius. Under this heat, the coating polymerizes and bonds tightly to the wire surface, subsequently cooling to form enameled wire. This constitutes a continuous production process, with each section of wire progressing through successive stages without interruption."

The manual proved surprisingly competent. Its authors wrote with clarity, candidly acknowledging which experts they had consulted and which factory processes they had referenced. One particularly valuable table recorded the number of lacquer layers, layer thickness, and room temperature resistivity for various wire diameters, all data excerpted from Soviet industrial specifications.

According to this simplified methodology, the equipment for boiling insulating lacquer could hardly be simpler: essentially a stove and a pot. Granted, the pot required some customization. Its lid featured an attached flue and accommodated a thermometer, a stirring rod, and a bubble viscometer tube. The stirring rod could be inserted through a small door in the lid. The viscometer tube measured coating viscosity—a critical parameter, as thinner wire diameters demanded lower viscosity coatings.

Feng Nuo scanned the equipment list. Nothing seemed beyond Lingao's manufacturing capabilities.

The formula for insulating lacquer called for 17% phenolic resin, 43% raw tung oil, 0.35% lead oxide, 0.1% cobalt drier, and 40% lamp kerosene. Reading this brought Feng Nuo considerable relief. Every ingredient could be sourced or produced in Lingao. While phenolic resin's availability remained uncertain, its synthesis ranked among the most elementary organic chemistry experiments from high school. As for the precursors phenol and formaldehyde, Lingao's chemical plants already manufactured both. Tung oil required no explanation—it had long served as a major Chinese export commodity and enjoyed widespread use among both the populace and the Senate's industrial system. Lead oxide, or litharge, had existed since antiquity. This alchemical byproduct deposited at furnace bottoms when refining silver and lead from sulfide galena ores. It held significance as both a medicinal material and, historically, a cosmetic whitening agent. Direct preparation posed no difficulty. Kerosene, naturally, was abundant. Only the cobalt drier remained questionable, but the manual helpfully noted that manganese drier, derived from manganese dioxide, could serve as a substitute. Since the Senate controlled manganese mines, this presented no obstacle.

The more Feng Nuo read, the more encouraged he became. The manual even included basic enameling machine designs. Some of the suggested indigenous substitutions—brick or wood frames in place of steel, multi-groove ceramic insulators instead of lacquering wheels, waste materials for oven construction—were no longer necessary to adopt in Lingao. Full steel equipment and requisite ceramic components lay well within production capacity.

More valuable still, the manual provided comprehensive empirical data: temperature ranges for both boiling and baking, optimal distance between wire and furnace wall, proper drier quantities, lacquering process line speed, and even the appropriate thickness for polishing felt. It covered the preparation of ventilation equipment and the acids and alkalis required for copper wire drawing and cleaning. However, Feng Nuo could largely disregard these latter sections. He intended to source all wire materials from the Standard Parts Factory. The workshop facilities already existed, and acids and alkalis could be requisitioned directly from the Planning Agency warehouse.

Finally, Feng Nuo transcribed the finished product specifications and quality inspection methods. If they were doing this, the standards achieved by indigenous methods during the Great Leap Forward era would serve as the bare minimum.

In the days that followed, Qian Yuzhi found himself conscripted into a grueling routine. Feng Nuo dispatched him hither and yon to procure various raw materials, then set him to daily experiments in boiling insulating lacquer according to the formula—all under conditions offering precious little protective equipment.

Though an order had been placed for the proper lacquer-boiling pot, its status as a specialized product meant a significant manufacturing lead time. What Feng Nuo had given him was, in reality, an ordinary iron pot—inferior even to the Great Leap Forward manual's specification, which at least featured a lid with flue and stirring port.

The boiling temperature exceeded 200 degrees, with baking temperatures reaching 300-400 degrees. The fumes produced were, to put it mildly, pungent. Gas masks remained the stuff of fantasy, modern 3M respirators even more so. The full extent of Qian Yuzhi's protective equipment consisted of a Lingao-produced 24-layer gauze mask and a pair of ungainly safety goggles.

To guard against burns, he wore thick work garments while boiling lacquer. Within hours, they became so saturated with sweat they might as well have been submerged in water.

Direct heating of the pot made temperature control exceedingly difficult. Overheating occurred frequently. Each time raw materials were ruined, not only were hours of labor squandered, but the Chief's countenance would darken considerably.

Day after day, Qian Yuzhi sweated profusely, his head swimming from toxic vapors. Upon returning home each evening, he collapsed into bed like a corpse, utterly forgetting the beautiful young woman in the College of Arts and Sciences uniform who resided in the attic above.

Listening to Qian Yuzhi's snoring drift up from below, Li Jianai lay sleepless in the darkness. Not because of the noise—her mind harbored weightier concerns.

In the blackness, she stared wide-eyed at the ceiling beams. She had lost contact with the "organization" for several months now.

Nothing like this had occurred in the three years since entering the Lingao Quarantine Camp. The knowledge pressed upon her chest like a heavy stone, or perhaps it was more accurate to say a cold void had opened in her heart. She shivered involuntarily, curling tighter into the corner and drawing the blanket more snugly around herself.

During her time in the Quarantine Camp, she had been small and orphaned—circumstances that led to her recruitment as a "monitor," extending her quarantine through several additional terms until her physical development accelerated a year later. Her exemplary performance in surveillance work, combined with favorable physical attributes and appearance, earned her subsequent assignment to the Maid School and formal development as a "hidden cadre" within the Political Security Bureau. Over two years, she received extensive clandestine training while continuing internal security work at both the Maid School and the restructured College of Arts and Sciences.

Upon graduation, the "organization" had informed her that once she reached her assigned posting, a new "superior" would contact her with assignments.

That had been her last communication with the "organization."

As time stretched on, Li Jianai's anxiety intensified. During training, instructors had emphasized that long-term latency or retirement would be accompanied by explicit instructions. Failure to contact one's handler by the prescribed deadline would be interpreted as defection. Yet in the months since joining the Tiandihui staff, no one had approached her. Discipline forbade her from initiating contact with her previous handler. Now she found herself adrift, uncertain where the breakdown had occurred. The loneliness of potential abandonment and the terror of possible liquidation gnawed steadily at her psyche.