Chapter 256: Prototype No. 2

Prototype Number One lasted exactly four days after its maiden trial before Ernest Teucher began systematically tearing it to pieces.

Hollen discovered the carcass at sixteen minutes past eight on Monday morning.

The old ironmaster hobbled into the experimental bay of Machine Works Number One balancing a tin mug of coffee in one scarred hand, his ash walking stick tucked under the opposite arm. He crossed the threshold, stopped dead on the oil-stained flagstones, and blinked against the bright flare of the gas mantles.

The road carriage was no longer an assembled mechanism.

Its wire-spoked wheels leaned against the far brick wall like discarded barrel hoops. The single-cylinder iron engine hung suspended from a rope tackle, dripping black oil into a shallow sand tray. The transmission gears were arrayed along a sheet of brown paper like a clockmaker’s salvage, and the steering assembly had vanished entirely.

A pair of gray wool trousers and two dusty boot soles protruded from beneath the inverted steel channel frame.

Hollen stared down at the boots. "Ernest."

A muffled clang of iron against iron echoed from the underside of the chassis, followed by the dry screech of a stubborn nut yielding half a thread.

"Good morning, Hollen."

"What in the seven provinces have you done to the horseless carriage?"

"I am removing the differential carrier," the voice replied, perfectly calm and slightly hollowed by the casing.

Hollen set his coffee down upon an upturned crate with a deliberate, sharp rap. "I possess eyesight, boy. My inquiry concerns your sanity."

A pair of greasy wrists appeared, gripped the frame rails, and Ernest slid out onto the grease board. His hair was plastered to his temple, his waistcoat hung open, and a black smudge of graphite grease ran diagonally across his left cheekbone. He drew an eight-inch box spanner from between his teeth and sat upright, rolling his shoulders to work out the stiffness.

"The differential housing is cast in ordinary gray pig iron," Ernest stated, pointing the tool at the offending lump of metal on the bench. "The wall thickness was calculated with an excessive safety margin to compensate for foundry porosity. The casting weighs fifty-four pounds. It is dead mass."

Hollen planted his stick between his boots, scowling down at him. "It worked, Ernest."

"It functioned," Ernest corrected, rising and tossing the spanner into a timber tray. "There is a measurable distinction between functioning and operating efficiently."

"It carried us eight hundred yards along the coal embankment without shearing a single tooth!"

"It vibrated so violently through the steering tiller that my wrists experienced intermittent numbness for three hours afterward," Ernest countered, walking to the wash basin and working the lever of the soap pump. "The unsprung weight on the rear axle caused severe tire scrub over every gravel seam. And the braking deceleration was so prolonged that we came within forty-eight inches of demolishing a timber coaling stage."

Hollen watched the young man scrub his arms with coarse carbolic soap, his white eyebrows drawing together in exasperation. "Most engineers in this kingdom celebrate a working machine before they reduce it to scrap iron."

"We celebrated."

"When?"

"Friday afternoon. We noted the velocity figures on the slate."

"Arthur brought a bottle of dry white wine," Hollen muttered.

"Precisely. A formal acknowledgment of the milestone was concluded." Ernest dried his hands on a rough huckaback towel, his dark eyes already wandering back to the clean drafting linen pinned to the central layout table. "Prototype Number One was an empirical demonstration of thermodynamic feasibility. It proved that a liquid hydrocarbon charge can propel a wheeled carriage without rails. That premise is established. We have no further need of the test bed."

Hollen pointed his stick toward the disassembled components. "You could have left it in one piece. For the archives. When you built the first stationary high-pressure boiler at sixteen, you didn’t sledgehammer the shell."

Ernest froze, his towel still looped through his fingers. He looked at Hollen, then slowly shifted his gaze toward the high timber shelf mounted above the tool racks.

Resting there in the dust, neatly labeled in faded black ink, were five artifacts: a crude, misshapen iron hook forged by an eight-year-old hand; a cracked steam-cylinder liner with an uneven bore; a burst copper steam pipe; a stripped bronze worm gear; and the charred armature of an experimental dynamo.

Hollen raised a single, heavy eyebrow. "Sentiment, lad."

"Those specimens," Ernest said with absolute, unyielding administrative dignity, "are preserved strictly for instructional purposes regarding metallurgical failure modes."

"Aye," Hollen grunted. "And that’s why you dust them every third Saturday."

Before Ernest could formulate an operational defense of his preservation habits, the workshop latch rattled open.

A junior draftsman entered carrying a roll of fresh blue-line prints, his leather cuffs inked to the elbows. "Chairman, the amended bore-and-stroke profiles from the tool room."

Ernest instantly abandoned the argument, waving the boy toward the table. "Lay them flat. Weigh the corners."

Hollen leaned over the table, squinting down through his spectacles at the bold India-ink elevations.

There were two cylinders now. Cast in a single water-jacketed block, standing upright side by side above an enclosed crankcase.

Hollen let out a low, gravelly whistle through his teeth. "Two barrels. You’re doubling the complications before we’ve even learned how to lubricate one."

"A single cylinder is inherently asymmetrical," Ernest said, leaning over the paper with a carpenter’s lead. "One power stroke every seven hundred and twenty degrees of crankshaft rotation produces severe torsional oscillation. The flywheel must carry all the kinetic energy through three idle strokes: exhaust, intake, and compression. The whole chassis is subjected to a continuous series of mechanical hammer blows."

He tapped the center of the drawing.

"Two cylinders, phased with crank throws at one hundred and eighty degrees. When Number One is on its power stroke, Number Two is completing compression. We halve the rotational fluctuation and distribute the torque evenly across the gear train."

Hollen traced the oil channels with a calloused fingernail. "It will balance better. I grant you that. But your machine-tool tolerances just tripled, lad. If the bore axes are out of parallel by half a thousandth, the pistons will scuff the liners within ten miles. And who is going to bore two cylinders in a single casting without the core shifting in the mold?"

"Machine Works Number One," Ernest said quietly, looking up to meet his partner’s eyes. "Because you are going to personally supervise the sand-molding."

Hollen stared at him for five seconds. Then he reached into his waistcoat pocket, pulled out an unlit briar pipe, and clamped it fiercely between his teeth. "You’re a ruthless young bastard, Ernest Teucher."

"I have complete confidence in your foundry management, Hollen."

"Aye. That’s what frightens me."

The pattern-makers required six days to construct the split mahogany cores for the twin-cylinder block.

The first pour in the brass-and-iron foundry resulted in cold-shut along the thin cooling jacket walls. The metal chilled before the air could escape the vents, leaving two porous voids near the exhaust ports.

The second casting survived the shake-out, but when the skin was turned off on the heavy vertical mill, a cluster of slag inclusions appeared directly in the path of the compression ring on cylinder two.

The third attempt produced a clean, ring-bright iron block. It sat upon the bed of the great horizontal planer for eighteen hours while the base flange and head face were cut true.

Hollen stood over the finished casting with a three-foot straightedge and a set of feeler gauges, his breath fogging in the cool morning air of the machine hall.

"Well?" Ernest asked, stepping up to the machine table.

Hollen slid a two-thousandth brass leaf beneath the steel edge. It bound instantly against the machined iron. He tested the diagonals. It bound again.

"Flat as a frozen pond," the old man admitted, straightening his stiff back with a wince. "The iron took the chill well. It’s hard as flint around the bores."

"Now the crankshaft," Ernest said.

"The crankshaft is going to make you weep, boy."

Hollen was entirely correct.

A single-throw crank for a steam pump could be forged under a steam hammer, turned on an ordinary gap lathe, and balanced with counterweights without delicate instrumentation. A multi-throw, high-speed combustion crankshaft operating at twelve hundred revolutions per minute was a different species of mechanism entirely.

The piece had to be carved from a solid billet of open-hearth nickel steel, heat-treated to an exact spring temper, and ground across four separate journals to an absolute cylindrical tolerance. If one pin ran out of true by the thickness of a cigarette paper, the destructive forces at peak speed would tear the center main bearing from its aluminum crankcase.

The first forging developed hairline quenching cracks along the fillet radius of the center journal.

The second warped three-sixteenths of an inch during the oil-quench.

The third was turned undersized by an over-eager toolmaker who forgot to allow for the final grinding pass.

Ernest stood beside the grinding machine at nine o’clock on a Thursday night, illuminated by a single incandescent carbon-filament lamp suspended by a cord from the rafters. The air smelled of sweet water-soluble oil and grinding dust. The emery wheel hissed with a high, sustained shriek as it kissed the rotating steel pin, throwing a flat fan of dull red sparks into the copper tray below.

Hollen sat on an empty nail keg ten paces away, whittling a pine match to clear his pipe bowl. "Stop peering over the splash guard, Ernest. You’ll take an emery grit in the eye, and Eleanor will hold me personally liable."

Ernest did not look back. He watched the spark stream thin to a faint, intermittent orange mist. "He has two-tenths of a thousandth remaining on the forward journal."

"The turner has hands like a surgeon, lad. Let the man work his feed screw."

Ten minutes later, the spindle stopped.

The machinist backed the wheel off, wiped the cold steel pin with a clean scrap of cotton fleece, and stepped aside, offering the micrometer to the Chairman.

Ernest stepped to the lathe. He dialed the thimble down with a practiced, feather-light touch.

Click.

He checked the anvil alignment. He lifted the frame, rotated the shaft ninety degrees, and checked it again.

Click.

The dimension was dead on the scribed specification. Not a whisper of taper; not a fraction of ovality.

Hollen did not rise from his keg. "Well?"

Ernest carefully laid the micrometer upon the wooden tool board. He turned, looking across the shadowy shop toward his partner, the tiredness lifting from his shoulders.

"Mount the flywheel," Ernest said quietly. "We pour the bearing babbit at sunrise."