As for Liesel, she had put herself to work in the house, after checking with Johan to find the location of mops and other cleaning tools. Delia had, after some resistance, given up and put her on the payroll. It wasn’t as if she would miss doing the housework; and, truth be told, the house had never been so clean.
It still wasn’t all that much of a payroll. All four Higgins employees worked for room, board and clothing, plus a very low salary, more of an allowance really. Oddly enough, they seemed to think her quite generous.
Delia had decided to raise the rates on the storage containers. She called up her renters with the bad news. Explaining that, with the change in circumstances, she had needed to hire added security. She lost a few customers, but by now she had a waiting list.
July 25, 1631: A Smithy in Badenburg
Johan watched quietly as young Master Brent went on, again, telling the blacksmith what the part did and why. “It’s really just a lever,” Brent said, “but it’s clever how it works. This end rests against a rotating cam that makes one complete rotation every two stitches. The cam has a varying radius. As the cam rotates, the short end of the level is moved in and out. That moves the long end of the lever up and down, pulling the thread or loosening it as needed to make the stitch. So it’s very important that each end of the lever is the right length and while the major stresses are vertical it needs enough depth to avoid bending. The model and the forms provide you with a system of measuring tools to tell how well the part is within specifications.” Then Brent looked at Johan to translate.
Johan did, sort of, his way. “See the pattern drawn on the board with the nails in it?” The board was a piece of one-by-eight about a foot long that Brent and Trent had made. He waited for the nod. Then took the wooden model and placed in on the nails where it fell easily to cover the internal line and leave the external line exposed. He wiggled it. The inside line remained hidden. The outside line remained in view, as there wasn’t much wiggle room.
“See the way it covers the inside line and doesn’t cover the outside line? This model would pass the first test if it was iron.”
He removed the model from the nails and slid it through a slot in the wood. “It’s thin enough it would pass the second test.” He then tried to slip it through another slot but it wouldn’t go. “It’s thick enough it would pass the third test. The fourth test is a weight test. But if it’s good iron and it passes these it should pass the last as well. So that’s the deal. Each one of these that passes the tests, we’ll pay you. If it doesn’t pass, we don’t buy it.”
Then the bargaining began in earnest. It took a while, but Johan got a good price. Not quite so good as he wanted, but better than he really expected. With the craftsman’s warning. “Mind, all my other work will come first.”
And so it went. Over the following days they visited craft shops of several sorts. They ordered finished parts where they could, and blanks where the techniques of the early seventeenth century weren’t up to the task. The blanks would be finished by the machines they had designed.
July 26, 1631: Dave Marcantonio’s Machine Shop
Dave would soon see the truth for himself. Kent had been bragging on his boys for weeks now. To hear him tell it, he’d fathered Orville and Wilbur Wright as twins. Dave returned the favor by teasing him about being a doting dad. Still, it was a fairly new situation. Before the Ring of Fire, Kent had been alternately pleased and worried about how his kids would turn out. Then, when Caleb had gone into the army, Kent’s pride had quadrupled, and most of the worry about how he would turn out had been replaced with worry about him getting hurt.