Machining in 1992

[Major national project + reborn in a bygone era + craftsmanship + business rivalries + independent technology]

Other people come back to make money. He comes back to build machines.

Lin Yuan, an old engineer who died of rage at an exhibition after his technology was blocked, returns to the spring of 1992. The first thing he does when he opens his eyes: what were the lottery numbers again? He spends half an hour trying to remember and comes up with nothing. His head is full of tool angles, material hardness, and heat-treatment curves.

“Damn it. Why did I bother memorizing all that stuff? All I did last time was memorize technical details, damn it.”

This time, he doesn’t dabble in stocks or real estate. He goes back to the workshop and starts with an imported grinder that has broken down. He presses his ear to the spindle to listen for the fault, sketches parts by hand, and works through the night as sparks fly from the oil quench. The moment the machine roars back to life, the whole factory falls silent. Old Qin, the factory’s proudest Level Eight fitter, walks over and offers him a cigarette.

From precision bearings to servo motors, from CNC systems to five-axis machining; from Fuji Electric in Japan cutting off supplies and strangling their progress to facing them head-on at the Munich trade fair; from “A township enterprise wants to make five-axis machines? A toad dreaming of eating swan meat” to exporting back to Germany. “From this day on, we will no longer look up to the world.”