Chapter 62: The giant mechanical hand

Translated by me, edited by drpetro.

To be perfectly honest, Ye Qing’s Monster Factory only had one real product — The rapid metal engraver.

The scooters were only an assembly product for his dad’s old factory, so now there was a question.

To expand and strengthen a factory by only selling a single product was the biggest joke ever.

Hence Ye Qing needed to figure out of the three new black techs, which one was easiest to make and will have wide reaches once it’s made.

[Titanium memory alloy] so far looked super easy. All it needed was to first build a metal smelting center, but the smelting center was just too difficult to build.

Ye Qing was prepared to wait until the raging miners had expanded the cavern to a certain extent, and build the smelting center hidden in the cave and away from prying eyes.

Ye Qing opened up the last blueprint and carefully examined the artificial mechanical limb.

When he was still in university, one of his profs said, mechanical movement was one of the easiest topics in the mechanical world, yet it was also one of the most complex.

Single joint mechanical movement was super easy, to the point that a piece of magnet can easily do it. However, if looking to synchronize multiple mechanical movements and perfect it, then the difficulty was through the roof.

Lathes were the perfect example. Back when the five axle CNC lathes was ruling the sky on the international scene, domestically we were still stuck with the three axles to get things done, as for the five axles, they were just like divine tool that you could only dream of.

The helper arm on the five axle lathe looked very much like a human arm. It could accomplish various degrees of accurate processing, yet it didn’t have a palm or an arm.

A hand has 14 finger bones, and 5 palm bones.

What does the five axle CNC lathes have?

Only a drill bit.

From this you could understand the difficulties involved in wanting to completely mimic human hand movements.

Yes, it was all the precision’s fault.

Without precision, all the artificial mechanic arms could do, so far, is destroy. Hoping on these things to perform long distance surgery was like cutting open someone’s stomach to remove the appendix, but instead cutting out the intestines. Then when it was time to sew up, instead of sewing up the cut, it stitches up the belly button.

Even with all those downsides, Ye Qing still had great expectations for mechanical limbs. If this actually got researched, then don’t mention the medical world, just the application within the transplant sector would be a complete jackpot.

A single excavator that could be as nimble as human arms, could easily out dig out three normal excavators. [ED: That a bit of an exaggeration, author.] [TL: Straight up foreshadowing.]

In dangerous situations, with the ability to control robots whose arms were as nimble as humans, don’t mention using them to deactivate bombs, they could even shoot down aircrafts.

The problems with cars having a super difficult time getting up and down mountains would also be solved. Just add four arms onto the car, and it becomes a climbing cheetah. If that’s still not enough, then add four more and it becomes a spider.

So far there are three ways to make mechanical arms move: pneumatics, fluids, and electric.

Pneumatics were the simplest, fluids had the biggest strength, and electric had the highest precision.

This was an electric and fluid powered mechanical blueprint, as it completely combined the advantages of both electric and fluid systems.

The blueprint was extremely detailed. Just with some enlargements, it was possible to see any parts’ structure and sketches.

Even if it was within the servo machine, there were countless coils of solenoids, which were suppose to increase the electric resistance within the control system.

After examining it for more than ten minutes, Ye Qing’s mind was literally blown and fried. Just the servo machine and hydraulic fluids within the electric fluid drive had already completely stumped Ye Qing.

Uhhhhh……

Let’s go examine the ionized environmental purifier for now.

The ionized environmental purifier, from the looks of it, could either be a negative ion air purifier, or an upgraded version of the electrostatic precipitators.

Those two types of equipment Ye Qing was quite familiar with. Lots of factories had electrostatic precipitators installed.

Their working principle was very simple, through the release of ions, they cause oxygen or dust in the air to create static electricity. Through mutual absorption they increase in mass and drop out of the air. Then they are absorbed onto a piece of metal plate with an opposite electrode.

Then, after careful examination, Ye Qing found himself to have seriously underestimated all these new black techs.

The ionized environmental purifier, not only could it work in the air, it could still fire off special ions in accordance to the character of the surrounding pollutants even if it was put in the water. This would cause the pollutants to become electrolyzed, and mutually attract each other towards where the machine