In the late autumn of 1974, Zhou Weidong, a young lathe worker in the old industrial base in Northeast China, accidentally discovered the mechanical drawings of the Japanese puppet period collected by his father when his father was disabled due to a work-related injury and his family was in dire straits. In order to save his family that was on the verge of being broken up, he took the risk to sneak into the abandoned "Mantie" machine repair shop and used the scraps from the workshop to imitate German precision clamps, thus getting involved in the technological black market whirlpool. From underground workshops to township enterprises, from "speculation" to "reform and opening up pilots", Zhou Weidong and his partners used rusty machine tools to forge the first spark of China's private manufacturing industry in the cracks of the planned economy. The novel uses a precise structure like the meshing of mechanical gears to reproduce how grassroots industrialists in the 1970s used hammers and calipers to hammer out the prelude of the market economy in the gaps between class struggles.
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