Chapter 273 - 22: Super-Satisfying 450-Piece Toolbox
On December 9th, Chen Zhou left the kitchen full of semicircular wooden rims and headed to the beach to receive his reward.
Since their first anniversary, the Space-Time Administration Bureau has become increasingly generous.
The last reward of a Damascus Steel Billet was already quite a surprise, and Chen Zhou thought this time's reward might be more ordinary and smaller in size. However, upon arriving at the beach, he was once again shocked by the lavishness of the reward.
This time, the reward was no smaller than a safe, rectangular in shape, and sitting squarely among wooden stone walls.
It appeared to be nearly a meter tall, with a length close to 90cm, and a width of over 50cm, still wrapped in a wooden frame.
However, unlike the packaging of other rewards, this one was not tightly wrapped, especially at the bottom, where there was a gap of about 3cm. Through the gap, he could see that the reward had four omnidirectional wheels.
These four omnidirectional wheels had a diameter of about 10cm, much larger than the casters on an ergonomic chair, and from a practical and durability perspective, they far surpassed the wheels of an ergonomic chair.
By removing them and installing them on a wooden pallet, and adding a handle to the pallet, it could be made into a cart.
With the cart, the container left on the hillside could be transported up the mountain, and during the transportation of stones, wood, and white clay, pulling two or three hundred pounds at once would not be a problem.
Just looking at these four omnidirectional wheels alone, Chen Zhou felt that he was about to make another fortune.
He approached, pulled off the eight corner-protecting foam pieces fixed on each corner of the wooden frame, and carefully pried off the nails on the wooden strips with the edge of an axe—those relatively complete could be reused.
Then, starting from the top, he dismantled the wooden frame piece by piece.
Soon, the items inside the packaging were completely presented in front of him.
It was a metal tool cart, primarily made of metal and plastic, with a color scheme of blue-gray and silver-white, featuring seven drawers from top to bottom.
Outside the cart, there were a few pieces of foam adhered to prevent scratches during transportation, which needed to be removed to open the drawers.
Before pulling out the drawers, Chen Zhou thought the box was empty, but it turned out to be filled with various tools.
They included various sizes of long and short hex sockets, box sockets, pneumatic sockets, ratchet wrenches, extension bars.
Various sizes of open-end wrenches, combination wrenches, adjustable wrenches, screwdrivers, as well as handle magnets, panel clips, air duster guns…
And the most useful to Chen Zhou were the tape measure, vernier caliper, dial torque wrench, snap ring pliers with internal, external, straight, and bent types, needle-nose pliers, diagonal pliers, and wire cutters.
Also included were locking pliers, slip joint pliers, punches, test pens, screw extractors, utility knives, ball peen hammers, rubber mallets…
Roughly counted, the total number of various tools in all seven drawer layers should be over 450, with a complete range of models, and most of them did not require electricity.
Chen Zhou believed that with this set of tools, he could disassemble most cars from the outside in, down to their parts—because it was a mobile car repair tool cart.
Unfortunately, for now, he only had the disassembly tools, but no car.
Despite the drawers being filled with an array of assorted, dazzling tools.
To be honest, ninety percent of these were useless to him.
For instance, those screw driving tools were currently of no use.
Also, tools like the test pen, oil filter wrench, LED work light, and oil seal hooks currently had no application.
However, to say they were completely useless would be too absolute. Chen Zhou could think of one application where they could be utilized—dismantling the combination lock of a safe.
During the forced disassembly of the safe, part of the combination lock was damaged, but most of the precise mechanical structure remained relatively intact.
According to Chen Zhou's understanding of mechanical safes, their security devices have a wealth of useful parts that can be disassembled.
This includes the core frame supporting the entire mechanical lock, and the lock body for installing basic components;
The lock core, which is inserted with the key to transfer rotational power and performs the locking and unlocking actions; the wafers that sense the key's bitting; springs, pins, blades, clutches, braking blocks, and reset springs.
Among these, the springs, some lock core and lock body components, clutches, and detent blocks are all useful for manufacturing firearms, and they are all made of steel or copper, which are superior in performance several levels compared to the easily corroded iron firearm parts of this era.
When cutting the steel plate of the safe, Chen Zhou deliberately avoided the body part of the safe and preserved the lock body.
At that time, he wanted badly to directly dismantle the precise and complex mechanical lock to extract the internal parts for later use, but due to the lack of appropriate tools, and with firearm building having a lower priority among all tasks, it had been postponed until now.
Unexpectedly, this wait finally led to the acquisition of good items, and with this set of car repair tools, dismantling the safe lock was no longer a problem.
Moreover, in the process of manufacturing firearms, various pliers and vernier calipers could provide him with ample assistance.
For a qualified mechanical engineer, precision and standard are always the rules that must be strictly followed.
If one behaves casually like some engineers in India, not respecting standards, they may end up with incidents like their torpedo destroying their own submarine, planes frequently crashing, or missile frigates capsizing.
In the absence of conditions, Chen Zhou has always maintained a commitment to excellence and striving for perfection in building machinery, and now with modern measuring tools, he was more determined to improve his standards.