Nanyang 1931: From piglets to giants

Chapter 19

Time flies like water, and in a blink of an eye, three months have passed.

Two months ago, several engineers came from Sweden. After selling short compressors, they took the initiative to find Zheng Yi for communication. Zheng Yi then realized that he had inadvertently designed a pneumatic valve that was ahead of the times.

Of course, Zheng Yi himself really enjoys communicating with them. He spent most of his previous life doing research work, and actually did not have much front-line work experience, so it was a bit like talking about theory on paper.

People who work in technology are always learning throughout their lives. Zheng Yi can only rely on himself for everything now, so he wants to learn a little bit of everything.

The engineers from Sweden were even more confused. After just two days of casual communication with Zheng Yi, they all felt like they had been enlightened.

You should know that compressed air has only been used on a large scale in the industrial field for more than ten years. In fact, even Atlas Copco, a leader in the compressed air field, is relatively immature.

They themselves don't know where this compressed air can be used.

But Zheng Yi came from modern society. In modern society, compressed air is generally used as much as possible on general production lines.

In all walks of life, especially in production industries that require power, at least 70% to 80% of the equipment needs to be driven by compressed air.

This resulted in Zheng Yi not realizing that he had said anything, but even his casual remarks could inspire these Swedish engineers greatly.

Picking up a blueprint, Zheng Yi drew them a design of pneumatic tools such as pneumatic jackhammers, pneumatic nail guns, spray guns, pneumatic grinders, etc. that can replace power tools.

They are not big things, just some small gadgets with simple structures. Even if he doesn't make them, they will soon become popular. It would be better to take them out and make some profits for himself.

It is precisely because these Swedish engineers admire him so much, especially because they think he is a genius among geniuses in developing application scenarios for compressed air.

After they tried to recruit Zheng Yi and wanted him to work in Sweden but he refused, they actually made Zheng Yi their agent in Asia, proactively got him a whole shipload of air compressors to sell, and said they could sell the goods first and pay later.

Even after hearing that Zheng Yi was running a parts factory, he generously said that he would let Zheng Yi produce Atlas consumables and accessories.
For example, small items such as filter elements and sealing rings, as long as they are of qualified quality, can be marked with the Atlas label and sold directly to customers in Asia as Atlas products.

Their only request was that Zheng Yi develop more applications for air compressors and unconditionally share their knowledge of new applications with them. Of course, Zheng Yi's patented pneumatic valves and the pneumatic tools he'd casually sketched also became Atlas's patents.

This was simply a godsend. They even sent two European engineers to help him build the factory, which greatly shortened the time Zheng Yi originally needed to build the parts factory.

Win-win.

What made him a little conflicted was that he had not yet decided whether he should really sell air compressors to the Japanese and help them design pneumatic solutions.

To be honest, it is difficult to say which field in this world is absolutely civilian and will not be used for military purposes. Selling this kind of equipment to the Japanese would really be aiding the enemy.

But if he didn't sell it to the Japanese, wouldn't the Japanese buy it from someone else? If he sold it, at least he could exchange it for some technology, equipment, money, or something.

They are both aiding the enemy and aiding each other. It is hard to say who is suffering the loss.

It made him quite confused.

Of course, he didn't put much of his energy into the air compressor. After all, it was someone else's property. His main focus in the past three months was on the spare parts factory.

Casting machines, sawing machines, machine tools, melting furnaces, die-casting machines, electric welding machines, cold treatment and heat treatment, etc. There are so many things needed, including power generation to power distribution, almost all machinery and equipment need to be purchased.

They even specially hired a large number of mechanical engineers from Japan. The Japanese salary is actually not high and is much cheaper than that of European and American engineers.

The entire factory, not counting the investment in land, factory buildings and other facilities, the cost of purchasing equipment alone reached RMB 1.8 million.

This amount of money was a huge sum for Li Xiaoshi.

(End of this chapter)