The World Dragon's Heir-Chapter 84: Premade Parts

The next morning, Dominic went straight to work milling the parts for his rifles that weren’t standardized and provided on the cart.

He was immensely grateful that they didn’t need to make their own barrels, as that alone would take multiple days for twenty rifles, not to mention all the different metals needed for the trigger actions they were provided.

Unless they greatly increased the size of his forge and gave him the specialized tools needed for barrel making, that was.

This morning, Dominic noticed that the loading levers, a hinged action that covered the trigger, had been stacked on his cart.

He had made them yesterday, but someone must have tasked another forge worker to make an entire box full of them for him last night.

That was one less part to deal with, other than the single hole he needed to drill in them for mounting.

If they kept this up, his job would be more like a precision fitment worker than a Gunsmith. But yesterday it took him a little over seventeen hours to assemble twenty, and three hours into the day, using magitech tools, he had the receivers for twenty more ready and a jig built to hold them in place while precision guiding each hole.

Another four hours to grind threads for bolts, shape and fit all the parts that were on his cart, and he was ready to start assembly.

The other smiths had gained many new parts for their builds, but Dominic did notice that many of the Gunsmiths disdained them and preferred to use only parts that they hand made themselves.

The old Armourer came over to see how Dominic was doing, and he flagged him down to ask a question.

"Where are all these parts coming from? The Royal Forges aren’t that large." Dominic asked quietly.

"There are two factories in the city dedicated to nothing but making rifle parts for the Royal Gunsmiths. They have a hundred men working three shifts a day.

At that rate, they’re producing far more parts than we need, but they will switch to another project in a month or two, once there is enough stockpile to cover the expected use for the year." The Armourer explained.

Well, that made more sense.

"You know, if we sent them one of these, and they duplicated it for me, I could save a few hours a day." Dominic joked.

The old man chuckled. "No, there is only so much the King is willing to outsource to a factory. Besides, it all needs to come here anyhow, as without an appropriate Trade Skill Core it’s impossible to activate any of the enchantments."

Dominic gave him a curious look, and the old man shook his head.

"It’s impossible for a regular human to activate any of the enchantments. Maybe a sorcerer with no skill core can just draw a new Magitech circuit and expect it to work with a touch of mana, but it doesn’t work that way for most of us."

Dominic shrugged at the explanation. Magitech was basically science, but with mana. Making it work wasn’t all that hard in his experience.

Dominic spent close to three hours assembling and testing the clearances of the twenty rifles, then began to do the enchantment.

Each was carefully hung to dry, freshly matte black from the enchanting process, which allowed Dominic to prepare his parts for the next morning again.

It was somewhat amusing to look at the other workbenches, with their carefully arranged tools, and then his own, with ten different drills, three sizes of thread taps and a complex framework built over the bench.

It looked like he lived in chaos, but when he went home only twelve hours into the day, his duties done, there were many envious glares.

But on the third day, his chaotic looking workbench wasn’t alone.

Four more of the benches had a jig and tooling frame built to speed up their work. But even better, someone had found him a new router and a magitech lathe. The Magitech tools had a precise guide for depth and travel, which allowed Dominic to do the majority of the milling work in under five minutes per rifle, instead of doing it all by hand with a rasp, or heat and a hammer. fɾeewebnoveℓ.co๓

On the third day, he didn’t even start assembling a single rifle for the first twelve hours. He just mass-produced parts. Now that he had multiple days worth of them, he only had to do the assembly and enchanting.

It made for a long day, but he only had to assemble rifles for the next few days, and that was a ten-minute process, if you ignored the drying and curing time.

His luck wasn’t going to be that good, as Dominic realized the next day at ten in the morning, when he had assembled twenty rifles from parts and was preparing to enchant them.

"You’re not expecting to just knock out twenty rifles and leave before noon, are you, Apprentice Dominic?" The old Armourer asked.

"Of course not, Master Smith. Once I finish these, I’ll make some more parts."

The old smith simply waited with the same disapproving look on his face until Dominic relented.

"I’ll finish another batch and then make some more parts?" Dominic tried.

"That’s better. Everyone in the forge is working close to sixteen hours a day. We can’t be having the apprentice going home early every day. It looks bad on the gunsmiths."

Dominic sighed. If the others weren’t so picky, they could be turning out more than two rifles a day and going home at a reasonable hour.

Fortunately, precision milling was a relaxing pastime for Dominic, and the satisfaction of seeing his pile of parts refill was immense.

If it wasn’t, he would have to rearrange his day because assembling two batches of rifles and oil bath enchanting them only took half the time that the others were expecting to be at work for.

With practice, the parts moved smoothly through the lathe and router stations, moving from box to box, so Dominic knew how many were left to mill for the next batch.

He rough finished all the materials he had before the end of the day, and then returned to his room, where Pops was waiting with freshly delivered late night food.

"I hear that you’re doing well in the rifle forges." Pops greeted him.

"Mass production wins every time. I’ve got a pretty good system down now." Dominic agreed.

The old dwarf chuckled. "They sent fifty of your rifles to the training grounds today, for the new regiment to train on. The way they’re going, I suspect the entire new regiment will be using your rifles, and the rest will be going to restock the officers of the other units.

I don’t know what you’ve been doing over there, but I filled all the tooling and equipment requests that they made. Hopefully, they’re working out for you."

"You made the new lathe and router? They’re wonderful. They turned an hour and a half process into under thirty minutes a rifle. I’ve got enough parts stocked now to keep up the pace for weeks, but you know how it is.

Can’t go home early, or everyone will think that we’re slacking and not taking our jobs seriously. But the Regiment is only so large. Eventually, we’re going to have more Rifles than men trained on them." Dominic joked.