ryethenovel Chapter 78 Before the game
Chapter 78 Before the game
After the inspection team left, life at the service station didn't get much easier.
The day of the competition was drawing closer, and the diesel engines in the workshop hummed from morning till night.
Ahai's speed in disassembling and assembling the host is approaching the provincial competition standard.
Old Fang squatted down beside him with a stopwatch, occasionally nodding, but mostly silently marking checkmarks on the record board.
Lin Xiu'e's pine planks were stacked higher than her knees beside the stone trough.
Each piece is marked with stone pencil positioning lines, the curvature of the grooves becomes more and more stable, and the error measured with calipers becomes smaller and smaller.
Every afternoon, Qiu Changhai would sit on the stone bench and turn walnuts. Occasionally, he would stand up, walk over to her side, glance at the depth of the groove, and not say anything. After looking at it, he would continue turning walnuts, walk back to sit down.
The entire service station was like a fully drawn bow, with everyone taut in their own positions.
But the person who was most tense wasn't in the workshop; they were in the new workshop.
Ding Haisheng's welding training entered its final sprint the day after the inspection team left.
Old Fang made several copies of the scoring criteria for the welding competition and posted them on the wall of the new workshop. Each item, including weld width, excess height, undercut depth, and back surface forming, was followed by a tolerance value.
Ding Haisheng squats in front of the welding machine every day, clamping the thick plate on the worktable, welding overhead, vertically, and flat corner seams, welding one by one.
The welding rod moves at a constant speed, the flux coating peels up on its own, and molten iron drips down onto the glove, burning a hole.
He never dodges. After finishing welding, he uses a welding slag hammer to knock off the flux coating, uses a weld seam measuring ruler to measure three sets of data, and fills them into the welder training record sheet.
He has already filled several notebooks with these data, and in the most recent pages, the tolerance has narrowed by more than half compared to the beginning of the year.
At the beginning of the year, the error in the height of overhead welding was fluctuating around a few tenths of a millimeter, but now it has been reduced to within 0.2, and there are several consecutive sets of readings that are completely consistent.
That afternoon he encountered a difficult problem.
This year, the provincial welding competition added a new category: overhead welding of thick plates with single-sided welding and double-sided forming.
The plate thickness has increased by several millimeters compared to last year, the current needs to be increased, the molten pool control is more difficult, and the back side forming can collapse or fail to penetrate if not handled carefully.
He tried several sets of parameters on the scrap board, adjusting the current from 120 to 130 and then to 140, but the back side molding was still not ideal, and the collapse depth exceeded the tolerance.
Ah Guang squatted down beside him, handing him welding rods and watching him weld, tap, and measure each piece. After measuring, he would write down a set of data in his notebook, and then continue welding the next piece.
Several scrap boards were piled up next to the workbench.
Each piece has several weld seams. After the weld slag is knocked off, a silvery-gray fish scale pattern is revealed. Some pieces have beautifully shaped backs, which A-Guang circled next to them with a stone pencil and kept as teaching aids. The pieces with deep collapses were marked with an X by Ding Haisheng and pushed aside.
His forehead was covered in sweat, and his gloves had several new burn holes. The old burn scars on the back of his hands were reddened by the sweat.
Ah Guang handed him the new welding rod, but he didn't take it. He put down the welding clamp, stood up, walked to the entrance of the new workshop, squatted there, and stared blankly at the seawater in the stone trough.
Lin Xiu'e stood up from the stone trough, took a cup of water and handed it to him, asking if he had trouble adjusting the parameters.
Ding Haisheng took a sip of water and said that he dared not increase the current for overhead welding of thick plates for fear of burning through, but without increasing it, the penetration depth on the back side would not be sufficient.
Lin Xiu'e said that when she went to Yantai for pre-competition training last time, Engineer Zhou mentioned that the welding parameters for overhead welding of thick plates could be referenced from the shipyard standards. The current should be higher than that for thin plates, but the electrode angle should be adjusted accordingly.
Ding Haisheng remained silent for a while, then stood up and walked back to the welding machine. He increased the current and moved the welding rod angle forward a few degrees before reigniting the arc.
This time the molten pool stabilized, and the back side formation was much better than before. Ah Guang measured three sets of data with a weld ruler, and the excess height and penetration depth were within the tolerance range.
After writing down the last piece of data on the record sheet, A-Guang looked up at Ding Haisheng and said that he had accumulated several notebooks of welding training records in the past few days. Since the beginning of the year, the tolerance of each group has been narrowing. Recently, these few plates can be selected as reference samples for the big competition.
Ding Haisheng squatted down and compared the parameters of the several qualified templates one by one, and then used a stone pencil to mark the numbers on his training board.
The major overhaul of Hong Xiaobing's third uncle's fishing boat is also underway.
The diesel engine was completely disassembled and placed on the worktable in the machine repair shop. The cylinder liners were replaced with new ones, the piston rings were replaced with new ones, the crankshaft was ground down, and the connecting rod bearings and crankshaft bearings were fitted with oversized old parts. Lao Fang led Hong Xiaobing to reassemble them one by one. After each assembly process, they used a torque wrench to check the torque, while Hong Xiaobing handed over the wrench and recorded the data.
The rotten planks at the bottom of the ship have all been replaced. The new planks fit in perfectly. Qiu Changhai cut the grooves, and Lin Xiue sewed the seams. Each seam was covered with a damp cloth for maintenance.
Ding Haisheng repaired the crack on the gearbox housing with welding rods. After repairing it, he smoothed it with an angle grinder. A Guang then remeasured the remaining height of the repaired area with a weld ruler.
The steering system was disassembled and calibrated, personally by Qiu Changhai. After calibration, it was reassembled, and Lao Fang checked the bolt torques with a torque wrench, ensuring that every value matched.
That afternoon, Wang Cunzhi came by on his motorcycle.
He parked the car at the gate of the courtyard and took two boxes off the back seat. One box contained the competition participation certificate, a cardboard piece covered with a plastic cover, with the competition items and numbers printed on it; the other box contained training consumables allocated by the province, including several boxes of new welding rods and several thick steel plates.
He put the things at the workshop entrance, took out the list of contestants that he had prepared long ago from his pocket, and read it aloud again.
Old Fang disassembled and reassembled the main unit, Ding Haisheng was a welder, Lin Xiu'e sewed the seams, A Hai diagnosed the fault, and A Guang was a substitute.
Old Fang crawled out of the cabin, wiped his hands with cotton yarn, and said that the list remained the same, but Ding Haisheng had encountered some difficulties in his welding sprint these past few days. He was working on a thick plate, and the back side kept collapsing during the overhead welding of a single-sided weld with double-sided forming.
Wang Cunzhi squatted down and looked at the molding data on the back of Ding Haisheng's samples, saying that Director Sun had gone to the provincial capital for a meeting last time.
I talked to a welder at Yantai Shipyard about this new project. He said that the current for overhead welding of thick plates cannot be rigidly based on last year's standard. It has to be increased according to the plate thickness. The electrode angle needs to be advanced. The control of the molten pool depends on the wrist, not the eyes.
After listening, Ding Haisheng picked up the welding clamp again and asked A Guang to push over another thick plate.
Old Fang took out a few new welding rods from the batch brought by Wang Cunzhi, checked their models, and handed them to Ding Haisheng. He said that the models and thicknesses of these new welding rods were similar to the parameters that Ding Haisheng had been welding with these past few days, and that Ding Haisheng should use these new welding rods to familiarize himself with the parameters for thick plates.
A few days later, one evening, Ding Haisheng squatted in the new workshop and finished welding the last thick plate overhead.
After the slag was removed, the silver-gray fish-scale pattern was neatly arranged, the back of the weld was uniformly formed, without any collapse or incomplete penetration, and all three data points of the weld inspection scale were within the provincial competition tolerance.
A-Guang entered the data into the last page of the training record sheet, looked up at Ding Haisheng, opened his mouth but didn't say anything, and just pushed the sheet in front of him for him to see for himself.
Ding Haisheng picked up the record sheet, looked at the data on the last page, and remained silent for a long time.
Then he took off his mask and placed it next to the welding machine, stood up and walked to the entrance of the new workshop, looking at the fishing boats waiting to be repaired in the stone trough.
The sunset glow was slowly receding over the sea, turning the water in the stone trough orange-red, and the small flags on the masts fluttered in the evening breeze.
Lin Xiu'e put away the last pine plank by the stone trough, Hong Xiaobing and Ashun hoisted the gearbox housing back into the engine room, and A Guang helped Lao Fang put the maintenance list and register back into the drawer at his workbench.
The entire service station had been waiting for him for weeks, waiting for him to weld a perfect seam. Now the seam is done.
That evening, Jiang Haiping took the competition registration form out of the drawer, wrote Ding Haisheng's name in the welder column, and checked the data in Ding Haisheng's latest welding training record again.
Overhead welding, single-sided welding, and double-sided forming all met the standards, within the provincial competition tolerances, and some data even exceeded the provincial competition standards.
Outside the window, the lights in the new workshop were still on, and the welder training record sheets were spread out on the worktable, the data on the last page gently turning in the evening breeze.
Ding Haisheng squatted at the entrance of the new workshop, held the old wrench with the character "Sheng" on the back in his hand and looked at it over and over for a while. Then he stood up, walked to the welding machine, and put the welding rod back into the welding clamp.
The provincial competition hasn't even started yet; we've only just begun to grasp the basics.