Chapter 20: Begging with a Golden Bowl

"Your name is Xu Qiang, right? We are in the same class. My name is Wang Yongsheng, and you can just call me Dasheng." said the man.

"Great Sage!" Hearing this title, Xu Qiang felt a little funny, but still asked expressionlessly: "What do you want to talk to me about?"

"Nothing, I just thought you did a good job just now..."

"Good performance? What does that mean?" Xu Qiang was stunned.

"There are more than 70 people in our class, but only a few dare to go against that Gao. Among the temporary workers, you are the first one." At this point, Wang Yongsheng gave Xu Qiang a thumbs up.

"You may have misunderstood. I have no intention of going against the acting monitor. I just want to fight for my rights..." Xu Qiang said with a frown.

It can be seen that this man with fashionable curly hair should be a regular worker in the factory.

However, the regular workers who come to work in the chemical workshop are basically the "troublemakers" in each workshop. The leaders of other workshops cannot control them, so they simply arrange them all to the chemical workshop.

The reason for doing this is that more than half of the workers in the chemical workshop are temporary workers. In order to keep their jobs or become regular workers, these temporary workers have a very good work attitude. Even if they are assigned a lot of work, they are willing to work hard and never complain. Therefore, even if these regular workers do not work on weekdays, the production tasks of the workshop can still be guaranteed.

In fact, Xu Qiang had noticed these regular workers a long time ago. They basically did not work much during the night shift. In the second half of the night, they simply gathered in the machine room of the workshop, played cards and slept. The team leader also pretended not to see them.

"No matter what you say, as long as you dare to go against that Gao, we are friends! This crappy workshop is full of flatterers. They all nod and bow when they see the leader. I won't fall for their tricks!" The curly-haired man said to Xu Qiang with a cynical look on his face, "After get off work tomorrow, let's have a drink together at noon..."

"I have something to do tomorrow. Besides, I can't drink, so you should find someone else." Xu Qiang replied casually.

Although it was obvious that the curly-haired guy wanted to make friends with him, Xu Qiang didn't want to have anything to do with these people. He just wanted to work peacefully in the factory and then pursue his own business after get off work. It seemed that there was no benefit in getting to know these people.

Moreover, tomorrow morning, Xu Qiang will bring the first batch of humic acid samples to the town supply and marketing cooperative. Once the samples pass the inspection, the deal will be officially done.

This matter is extremely important to Xu Qiang, so even if the factory director invites him to drink tomorrow, he will not go.

"Then when do you have time?"

"Let's talk about it later." After saying that, Xu Qiang turned around, pushed the flatbed cart, and started working with others.

……

As usual, we pulled carts and moved goods, and by four o'clock in the morning we had completed today's work.

In Xu Qiang's opinion, for a chemical workshop to develop products such as civilian sofas is simply begging with a golden bowl in hand!
Even if a handmade sofa can be sold in the market, it can only support a few people. You have to know that Shengli Machinery Factory is a large factory with tens of thousands of employees. Without strong products and technologies, it is impossible to solve the livelihood problems of so many workers.

The main ingredient of the raw materials used in the production of No. 2 engineering explosives in this chemical workshop is ammonium nitrate, which is also the most widely used fertilizer.

Therefore, if the chemical workshop of Shengli Machinery Factory wanted to switch to the production of civilian products, it would be an easy thing to do. Moreover, the predecessor of the chemical workshop was an agricultural fertilizer factory.

When Xu Qiang first came to this workshop, he only took a quick look at the equipment inside and knew the general idea. As a factory producing rock ammonium nitrate explosives, the production process is relatively complicated.

At that time, many third-tier enterprises dug holes in mountains and built bridges over water, and there was a huge demand for this kind of explosives, so there was a constant flow of orders during those years.

But now, the country has developed cheaper and more efficient engineering explosives, so that since last year, military orders have been shrinking, and even this year's order volume is less than a quarter of last year.

In addition, there has long been a saying among the people that "fried explosives". The main raw materials are fertilizer ammonium nitrate, sawdust and diesel. First, mix the ammonium nitrate and sawdust in proportion and stir-fry them in a large iron pan. Then add an appropriate amount of diesel and stir evenly, and the explosives are "fried".

Because it was cheap and easy to operate, there were still many experts among the people who specialized in making explosives for mining development projects in various places until many years later. These people actually snatched some orders from their chemical workshops.

The technology is backward, the equipment is old and the energy consumption is high. The current chemical workshop is a money-losing unit except for completing the production task. It is only because the factory is large and powerful that it can afford it. Otherwise, it would have gone bankrupt long ago.

Therefore, in Xu Qiang's opinion, if the workshop wants to turn losses into profits and carry out military-to-civilian conversion, it must first change its mindset. In addition, it must carry out technological innovation to reduce consumption and increase production of the ammonium nitrate production line.

Speaking of ammonium nitrate, its main raw material is coal.

The specific process is to first use coal in a gasification furnace to generate a carbon monoxide mixture, which is then mixed with hydrogen and nitrogen to obtain the raw gas for ammonia, which is then vaporized and synthesized in a synthesis tower to generate ammonia.

In addition, nitrogen oxides are converted into nitrites and nitrates through air purification equipment.

Finally, ammonia and nitrogen oxides undergo a series of reactions to produce ammonium nitrate.

The whole process sounds complicated, but in fact, the production equipment required is not too demanding.

The equipment here is quite old. On one of the equipment, which had a nameplate printed entirely in Russian, Xu Qiang saw the words "1946.8" clearly printed on it.

It is obvious that this machine was produced before liberation.

During the First Five-Year Plan period, the country completely absorbed and assimilated Soviet industrial technology and equipment. It was not until the later period of the First Five-Year Plan that domestic chemical equipment was gradually put into use. However, some key equipment still could not be domestically produced.

In fact, by the early 1980s, the country's chemical industry equipment had made great progress, especially fertilizer chemical products, which had been fully domestically produced.

Xu Qiang guessed that the main reason why there were still such old-fashioned machines at Shengli Machinery Factory was that the chemical workshop of the factory did not seem to be taken seriously. The engineering explosives produced were probably only to complete the tasks assigned by superiors and were not the core products of the factory. Therefore, they did not apply to their superiors to spend huge sums of money to replace, upgrade and modify the entire production line.

However, from Xu Qiang's professional point of view, even if the entire production line is not replaced, only some minor technical improvements can be made to increase the output of this production line to a certain extent, saving a lot of costs.

In just a few hours, Xu Qiang already had a technical improvement plan in his mind. He then took out a notebook and pen from his clothes and started to sketch on it.

Xu Qiang did this entirely out of a work habit from his previous life. At that time, he had served as a technical consultant for several private chemical companies and had very rich design experience. As for this somewhat "primitive" ammonium carbonate production line in front of him, Xu Qiang had enough experience to give it a makeover.

(End of this chapter)