Chapter 873: Section 575: Discovery (Part 2)
Weapons produced by Malin’s workshop typically have a unique firearm number, a series of letters and numbers engraved on the butt of the gun representing the identity of the manufacturer, consisting of six letters and eight numbers. The letters represent the abbreviation of the manufacturer’s name and race, and the numbers denote the sequential number of the gun they have made.
The absence of a firearm number indicates that the gun did not undergo the final storage procedure and was directly sold to this unnamed organization.
Malin took out a gun, disassembled it, and confirmed the barrel—on the tail end of the barrel, there should be a symbol: the hammer representing Dwarves, the sun for Elves, the clover for Half-humans, the large boots for Gnomes, and the fist for Humans, which denotes which race’s artisans crafted the barrel.
There was no symbol on it, but Malin noticed an irregular cut at the end of the barrel—this signifies that the end of the barrel had been manually cut.
This means the barrel is a defective product—because normally, before coming off the lathe, patterns must be stamped on the barrels. The only ones that wouldn’t have patterns are defective products, as they are destined to be reprocessed. Hence, the end of the barrel is also manually sawed off, and at an angle.
Malin checked the length of the barrel and found that the end had likely been recut, comparing it to the rifle Tuojin was carrying on his back, the barrel of the two guns differed by about ten centimeters.
"It seems that they extended the stock and reduced the length of the fore-end to create the illusion of being the same as the rifles we have," Tuojin also noticed the issue and looked towards Malin, "The fore-end doesn’t seem to be made of wood grown in the South."
"Right, the stock and fore-end did not come from our workshop, nor are these parts that were disassembled standard parts produced by our workshop."
As Malin disassembled a few more rifles, he discovered a significant problem—three bolts, with length discrepancies of +2 centimeters, +1 centimeter, and -1 centimeter, respectively.
These were just the issues with the bolts; all the parts on these guns were handmade. Although they fit tightly, replacing some parts caused problems.
In Malin’s workshop, such craftsmanship would get an artisan kicked out by his peers—there were plenty of high-level artisans outside who wanted to get in. To think such skill would show up to embarrass themselves?