Chapter 14
As time passed and the weather began to grow hotter, I ran into an unexpected obstacle while preparing the drawings for the second prototype.
Adding gripping grooves to the side of the rifle and widening the bolt-handle recess a little didn’t seem difficult. But when I asked how we could mass-produce a bent bolt handle, Dr. Schneider didn’t answer right away.
“Wouldn’t it be enough to machine it according to the drawing?”
“For a single rifle, yes.”
The doctor placed a finger on my drawing.
“But wouldn’t things be different if we were making thousands of the same part?”
A few days later, Paul Mauser visited the palace and said something similar.
“Father. I want to go to the factory and see how they make it.”
As soon as he heard that, Father objected.
“The factory is dangerous. I can’t take you somewhere full of spinning machinery and red-hot metal. Do you know how dangerous it is?”
“Then how am I supposed to design a rifle without knowing how they make it at the factory?”
“Can’t Mauser just figure it out?”
“That’s what happened with the first rifle, and it came out strange.”
“Still, no! Absolutely not!!”
It wasn’t until Paul Mauser submitted a plan promising to stop the machines around the tour route and set up safety barriers and guards, and Dr. Schneider added that design instruction had its limits if I didn’t understand the manufacturing process, that Father finally gave his conditional permission.
Father’s expression looked like he’d swallowed something foul, but what could I do?
We left Berlin the previous evening and spent the night in a railcar reserved for the Imperial Family. When we headed to the factory the next day, they had cleared the passageways and even put barriers around the machines because a princess was coming.
The problem was that, because of that, the factory no longer looked the way it normally did—the way I’d wanted to see it.
“Is it always this clean?”
“Yes, of course, Your Highness.”
The factory manager guiding us answered, his eyes darting. It was obvious to anyone that he was lying.
At the sight, Mauser cleared his throat and explained.
“His Majesty the Emperor gave special instructions, so we tidied up a little today.”
“I thought so.”
It seemed they’d done far more than a little cleaning, but even so, a nineteenth-century factory was fascinating.
Shafts installed near the ceiling rotated endlessly, and wide leather belts hanging from them powered the machine tools. The sound of metal being cut filled the building, mingling with the smell of cutting oil and hot steel.
In the factory of my previous life, every machine had its own electric motor, and operators used buttons to adjust its speed and position.
Here, a single power shaft drove several machines at once. Workers moved the belts to connect the machines, then turned handles to feed the tools forward a little at a time.
“Your Highness, please be careful with your hands.”
“Your Highness, this area is dangerous. Don’t go inside the barriers.”
“Your Highness! Don’t reach out your hand!!”
The chief steward who had come along with me nagged me about every little thing I did, until my ears were practically ringing.
“I know, I know.”
Leaving the horrified chief steward behind, we first went to look at the bolt-making process.
I’d imagined them machining a finished, rod-shaped bolt out of a solid piece of metal. The actual process was different.
They placed heated steel between a massive hammer and a die, hammered it into a basic shape, then used several machines to cut each section in turn. The locking lugs, body, and handle were already roughly formed from the start.
A technician unfolded the drawing of the bent bolt.
“To make it in the shape Your Highness wants, we’d have to change the forging die first.”
“What if you bent the existing bolt handle afterward?”
“We could do that for a few test rifles. But we’d have to heat and bend it, then heat-treat it again, and the shape could vary a little from one piece to the next.”
The technician placed the original bolt and the new test bolt side by side.
“For all new production, it would be better to forge it in a bent shape from the start. But then we’d have to prepare new dies and inspection tools.”
On the drawing, bending a single line had meant changing the dies, the process, and the inspection standards at the factory.
Nearby, they were fitting finished bolts one by one into a metal gauge.
Some slid in smoothly, while others caught halfway. They marked the parts that caught with chalk.
“This is an inspection to confirm the parts were made to the dimensions on the drawing.”
The technician explained.
I watched as the tolerances the company’s engineers had added to the drawings became the criteria for accepting parts or reworking them. If the tolerances were too tight, even usable parts would be thrown away; if they were too loose, each rifle would feel and function differently.
It wasn’t enough to think only about the shape of the bent handle. Bolts made by different workers had to lock in the same way, no matter which rifle they went into.
The stock was no different.
The gripping grooves on the side of the stock could be made fairly quickly with a rotating cutting tool. But if workers held the stock in place by hand, the grooves’ starting point and depth varied slightly.
I examined several test pieces with grooves of different depths.
“Couldn’t we put it in a fixture and hold it in the same position every time?”
The technician looked up.
“Do you mean a dedicated jig?”
“If you always place the rifle in the same spot and use a stop to limit how far the tool moves, they should come out almost identical.”
The technician spoke briefly with the factory manager.
“That’s certainly possible. If we’re making a large quantity, it would be faster than measuring the position by hand. Other rifles already use similar methods, so we could make a jig quickly if we have the budget and time.”
“Then please do that.”
Before answering, the factory manager looked at Mauser, who smiled and replied,
“Calculate the cost first, then we’ll decide.”
‘As expected, money makes the world go round.’
I tried holding three rifles with gripping grooves of different depths. The deepest gave my fingers a firm hold, but the cut was so deep that the wood looked thin. The shallowest looked neat, but I doubted it would make much difference when wet.
In the end, I chose the one in the middle, but decided to round the edges of the grooves a little more.
I added a thin, tube-shaped metal reinforcement to the sling slot. It would keep the leather from rubbing directly against the rough edge of the wood and spread the load a little more when the sling was pulled.
“How many extra steps does this one part add to the process?”
The technician counted them off on their fingers as they answered.
“We have to cut the slot into the wood, make and insert the reinforcement, smooth the edges, and inspect it. It adds at least three steps.”
“Will it help?”
“It should extend the sling’s life and improve the rifle’s durability.”
“Then leave it in.”
The factory manager looked at Mauser again.
I didn’t miss the glance.
Adding a good part didn’t automatically make a good military rifle. Even if each rifle took only a few extra minutes to make, that added up to an enormous amount of time across a hundred thousand rifles.
“Making one rifle and making a hundred thousand are two different things.”
A veteran worker standing nearby said.
In the afternoon, we went to look around the finished-goods assembly area.
There, I spotted a familiar shape.
It was too large to be called a pistol, but it had no stock, so it seemed too small to be called a carbine. Despite being a pistol, its magazine was attached in front of the trigger, not in the grip.
“That’s a C96.”
I said the name without thinking.
Mauser heard me, stopped walking, and asked,
“Are you familiar with it?”
“I saw a drawing of it in Father’s study once.”
I made up an excuse in a hurry. It reminded me once again that the first rule for someone reincarnated was to watch what they said. It would be disastrous if I accidentally mentioned something like World War I.
Paul Mauser picked up one of the pistols on the workbench.
“It’s our company’s automatic pistol. The force generated when it fires ejects the casing and loads the next round automatically.”
I took the pistol from him.
It was far too large for my hand. With the magazine at the front, the weight seemed concentrated ahead of the grip. Since the internal magazine had to be loaded from above with a clip, reloading quickly looked difficult.
Of course, the fact that the next round loaded automatically after a single pull of the trigger was remarkable for this era.
A worker showed us the bolt inside cycling back and forth.
Clack.
Small metal parts pushed against one another and moved in a precise sequence.
With a rifle, I had to operate the bolt myself, but the pistol cycled on its own under recoil.
‘If I were to design one from scratch...’
The cross-section of a familiar pistol came to mind: a magazine inside the grip, a slide around the barrel, a spring beneath the barrel, and a hammer that swung back.
I remembered the shape.
The problem was that I couldn’t quite remember how far each part had to move, how strong the spring needed to be, or at what angle the rounds had to rise.
Mauser took the pistol back and said,
“Automatic pistols are still a field where no one has found the right answer. Several companies are trying different approaches.”
“Even so, don’t they all load the next round by themselves?”
“The difficult part is making that process reliable.”
I made sure to remember that.