Baek Mujeong Set Two Same Named Screws at Opposite Ends of the Bench

Baek Mujeong set two screws bearing the same name at opposite ends of the workbench.

One turned two full rotations into the telegraph terminal before spinning loose, and the other would not even enter the opening. Both boxes read "three-bun telegraph terminal screw."

"Drop the name."

Seokbeom picked up the ink brush.

"Erase the box name?"

"If you erase it, you can't find out who lied. Write a new number beside it."

Mujeong wrote gap on the first screw and eul on the second. The thread count, the pitch, the outer diameter, the head width were all still blank.

Outside the workshop door, the repair line was long. Rifles back from battle, cracked battery plates, bent telegraph terminals, soot-blackened relay covers arrived cart by cart. The quartermaster officer held out an order demanding ten new rifles be made first.

"New is faster than repair."

Mujeong did not take the order. He pointed at the broken goods on the cart.

"You don't even know the right screw, and you want new ones first?"

"Just make the new rifles to one workshop's spec."

"Barrel, bolt, spring, screws, heat treatment. Does one workshop produce all of that?"

The officer fell silent.

"And the copper?"

"If the telegraph bureau spares some..."

"You strip the telegraph machines to make rifles, and when the rifles break, what do you strip then?"

Mujeong drew a space beside the order for the eleven broken items. He left the column for new weapon production empty.

"We disassemble these eleven first. Don't touch anything else."

Seokbeom asked.

"Why eleven?"

"Eleven broken items have receiving slips right now. I'm not counting the ones still expected."

Park Sangho came in with two soldiers, carrying six rifles. Each one had a paper tag tied to its sling. Three from First Company, two from the North Gate rotation, one from the dock guard unit.

"I told you to bring only the broken ones," Mujeong said.

Sangho set three intact rifles down on the floor as well.

"For comparison."

"I thought the company would hide those."

"If we hide how many are intact, the failure rate after repair becomes a lie too."

The quartermaster officer shouted.

"You're disclosing available rifle positions to the whole workshop?"

Sangho saluted precisely.

"First Company has twenty seven available, North Gate has nineteen, dock guard has twelve. Six broken. I attached the soldiers' names and the time of each failure."

He read the paper tags aloud. The first rifle's bolt would not close after firing, the second had a shallow firing pin strike even after cleaning, the third jammed on a casing during the second load. The remaining three had no user name, only the company and the rotation time.

"What about the three with no name?" Mujeong asked.

"Two people handled them in succession, so it's still being confirmed. I wrote unknown."

Mujeong did not add a cause of failure to the paper tags. Bolt malfunction, weak firing pin, jammed casing were symptoms. Whether a screw was the cause could only be known after disassembly.

"Any rifle someone rebuilt on their own?"

Sangho pushed one rifle aside.

"Dock guard unit. Someone hammered a small screw in. It fired once and hasn't opened since."

Mujeong looked at the quartermaster officer.

"You said new was faster. You broke it fast, all right."

He did not clamp the rifle into the vise. If he pulled out a forced screw first, the threads could tear out with it. He dropped a bead of oil and waited for the heat to cool.

The telegraph bureau operators brought up five telegraph parts. Two terminal plates, one relay contact, two battery case clamps. Each carried a delivery slip from a Japanese trading house, a Qing technical network, or a Joseon workshop. Only three Korean names existed for the parts, but the screw heads were all different shapes.

"Six rifles, five telegraph parts," Seokbeom said. "Eleven."

"Count again."

Seokbeom checked not the number of items but the receiving slips against the user marks. One rifle's paper tag had been swapped with another company's marking. Park Sangho checked the cord color and corrected it. Only after the eleven items matched the eleven lines of record did Mujeong pick up the first screwdriver.

The disassembly order was not by cause of failure but by least risk of damage. The terminal plate with an intact screw head, the battery case with no heat damage, the rifle with an open bolt. The forcibly hammered rifle and the scorched contact were left for last.

"Why not start with the rifles?" the officer asked.

"Does metal break less because a man is in a hurry?"

"The gate is waiting."

"Break it and you'll wait longer."

Mujeong rolled the gap screw across a thin sheet of paper. The ink-stained threads left parallel black lines. Five threads within the same length. Eul had six. Seokbeom measured again with wire and a ruler.

"Gap, five. Eul, six."

"Don't write what I say. Write your own reading."

Seokbeom switched rulers and measured again. The result was the same. Mujeong did not call it a success and instead handed the retest to Park Sangho.

Sangho's hands were clumsier than when he handled a rifle. He wound the wire off by one thread. His first count came out different.

"Again," Mujeong said.

"I'm not a craftsman."

"If you can't measure it in the field, you can't use the spec sheet either."

Sangho unwound the wire and marked the starting point of the thread with ink. The second time, he got the same count as Seokbeom.

The third screw had the same head width but a slanted thread. The fourth had the same thread count but a different diameter. The fifth had a tapered tip so the first turn fit and every turn after caught.

Seokbeom extended the number tags. Byeong, jeong, mu. He did not erase the box names, only wrote the source and symptom beside them.

When they opened the rifle bolt, they found file marks on the inside. Someone had widened the thread to force in a screw that did not fit. The original spec had already been damaged.

"This one can't be counted," Seokbeom said.

"Count the current thread and the remaining original thread separately."

"But we don't know what the original was."

"Write that you don't know."

Mujeong wanted to restore the original dimensions by his own hand's feel. Looking at the direction of the filed metal shavings and the one remaining thread, he could make a guess. But if he put a guess on the record, the next apprentice would come to trust his hand as the standard. He wrote instead: "Original spec unconfirmed, current state prohibited from use."

The sixth rifle had a shallow thread angle that loosened when shaken. The spring length was also different. The officer suggested pulling the spring out of the record.

"The spring isn't the cause of failure."

"The screw is loose too. Write both. If you write that it was fixed with one correct part, that's a lie."

Mujeong made a separate chain-of-process chart. Material, cutting tool, heat treatment, assembler, company of use, maintenance record. It was a chart with many blank columns.

Before the lunch bell rang, the number tags had grown to nine. Gap, eul, byeong, jeong, mu, gi, gyeong, sin, im. It was not only the thread count that differed. Even among screws with the same thread count, the angle, depth, and tip shape varied.

Seokbeom spoke.

"If we choose one, can we just grind down the rest?"

Mujeong looked at the dies and files on the workshop wall. Every craftsman had his own thread die. Standardize to one, and some dies would become scrap metal, and some hand skills would turn overnight into skills that only produced defects.

"Not choosing yet."

"The gate is waiting."

"I haven't even seen all eleven."

The last two broken items were the heat-damaged relay contact and the hammered-in rifle screw. Mujeong scraped off the black residue on the contact, then loosened the screw. The tenth screw's threads were crushed, but at the undamaged root, six and a half threads remained.

The hammered-in screw ended up snapping its head off. Seokbeom brought over a drill and Mujeong stopped him.

"Test piece first."

They drilled three holes in the same soft metal and tested screw extraction at three different angles. The first test piece tore at the hole wall, the second only crumbled the screw head further. Only on the third did the body turn free.

Park Sangho laid the extracted screw on the paper. Beneath the crushed threads, one line of the original thread remained. It did not match any of the other ten.

"Eleven," Seokbeom said.

Mujeong posted the tally beside the number tags. On the workbench lay the eleven broken items, eleven lines of thread records, and the three intact comparison rifles, all lined up.

The quartermaster officer asked.

"So which one do we standardize on?"

"Not decided."

"You counted all eleven?"

"Now comes the count of what we'll have to throw away."

Mujeong had a number tag attached to every thread die on the workshop wall. It was a column for recording which die produced which thread, which craftsman used it, and whether an apprentice could reproduce it.

Down from the wall came the Japanese-style dies, the Qing comb files, the Joseon-style female thread jigs, and the steel plate for setting thread angle.

Mujeong cut the same iron rod to the same length for each tool, made test pieces on all of them, and recorded who produced the same thread and in how many tries.

Seokbeom made two test pieces with the Japanese-style die. The first matched the gap screw, and the second caught partway through.

"It's the same tool."

"The hand pressure is different."

"Then it's not the spec, it's the hand?"

"Both the tool and the hand."

Mujeong did not grab Seokbeom's wrist to correct the angle. He made him say where the force had changed. Seokbeom wrote that he had used one more drop of oil on the first test piece, and that on the second he had not chamfered the tip of the rod.

Another craftsman set a Joseon-style female thread jig on the workbench. One side of the handle was short, so only a right-handed user could apply steady force. Apprentices who turned it left-handed had a starting point that was crooked every time.

"Just throw this out and give him a new jig," the quartermaster officer said.

The craftsman gripped the handle.

"Who pays my day's wage while I learn a new jig? What does my apprentice eat while I'm relearning?"

"Once a national standard exists, orders will grow."

"If my jig gets dropped, the orders go to another workshop."

Mujeong did not record the craftsman's words as loyalty or objection. He split it into four columns: whether the current tool could still be used, the cost of a new tool, the retraining period, and the existing orders that would be lost. The amounts and the periods were still blank.

Park Sangho reached to pick up the three intact comparison rifles again, then stopped.

"These need to go back for the gate rotation."

"Leave one," Mujeong said.

"Availability drops."

"Without a comparison piece, you can't tell if the repaired rifle is right."

Sangho moved one rifle from the company availability sheet to the test-standby column. It meant leaving in the workshop an intact rifle that would otherwise go back to his own men. He wrote his own name in the standby end time and responsible party columns.

"They move once they eat. The rifle moves once it's right too."

Thanks to that one rifle, they could actually test the three newly cut trial screws against a real bolt. Two fit, but one left metal shavings at the thread tip after ten cycles back and forth. Fitting the first time and holding up through repeated use were not the same thing.

Beside the eleven charts, Mujeong added columns for "first fit," "ten cycles," and "field reassembly." Before choosing a single standard, the work that needed testing had only grown.

The quartermaster officer asked.

"So when do you narrow it to one?"

"After the tool cost, the days needed to relearn, and the failure rate are all attached."

"Will the war wait for that?"

"If we call something correct as one standard just to make an excuse of war, the next breakdown comes even faster."

Seokbeom picked up his own mentor's old die. It did not match precisely to any of the eleven lines on the chart.

"Does this become useless, then?"

Baek Mujeong could not answer.