"Let's start with five hundred units!" Fangfang said.
"Alright! Fang Jie, I'll arrange for the factory to ship them out as soon as I get back tomorrow." Zhang Yi immediately agreed to Hu Yifang's request.
By the time Zhang Yi finished up, it was already past six in the evening. He said to Zhang Yingying, "Yingying, I'm really sorry to have kept you waiting so long. Let's go eat! Fang Jie, why don't you come eat with us too?"
"No, thanks! I still have some things to handle at the shop, and I don't want to disturb your time together or be a third wheel. But make sure you ship the goods to me soon!" Hu Yifang said.
"Alright, then we'll be going now! Goodbye, Fang Jie."
"Goodbye, Fangfang!"
After saying that, Zhang Yi got into his small delivery truck and drove toward the nearest hotel. As for the car he had bought, the 4S dealership would naturally deliver it back for him.
During dinner, Zhang Yi and Zhang Yingying chatted and laughed, thoroughly enjoying their meal. At the same time, their favorable impressions of each other rose sharply.
After dinner, Zhang Yi took Zhang Yingying home and realized it was already past ten at night. He decided not to travel at night. Although the roads were now wide and smooth, nighttime driving still carried certain risks. So, he booked a room nearby and planned to head back the next day.
Just as Zhang Yi finished booking the hotel and was about to sleep, his phone rang. He saw that it was Xiao Hua calling and immediately answered.
"Brother! Why haven't you come back yet? Mom is worried sick!" Sure enough, Xiao Hua was urging him to go home as soon as he answered.
"Xiao Hua, tell Mom I won't be coming back tonight. It's already this late, and driving at night isn't safe. By the way, nothing happened at the factory today, right?" Zhang Yi asked.
"Of course not! With me there, what could happen? But I received a call at the factory today. They said they were from the Jiangnan Province Electric Vehicle Manufacturing Group and wanted to acquire our company. I turned them down, but they haven't given up. They said they would send someone over tomorrow to discuss it with us in detail." Xiao Hua thought for a moment before speaking.
"You did the right thing by refusing them! If you get calls like that in the future, reject them directly. Our factory may not have much capital, but we're nowhere near the point of selling the factory or our shares. Besides, I found another distributor today." Zhang Yi said.
"Alright, Brother, I understand. Let's leave it there for now. I'm going to rest first. Good night." Unlike others, who would likely have asked Zhang Yi for his opinion first, Xiao Hua had refused outright. This was because she was not only Zhang Yi's mother's goddaughter, but also the first scholar hired by Zhang Yi through the Scholar Hiring System. After spending this time with him, she understood very clearly that he possessed the Scholar Hiring System and had an incomparably bright future ahead of him. To put it nicely, even the people of Earth could no longer stop his rise.
"Good night." After saying that, Zhang Yi took his pajamas and headed for the bathroom.
Zhang Yi did not return to the factory until after nine the next morning. By then, the factory had already begun building the production line, and progress was extremely fast. By the time he arrived, the various parts of the production line had basically all been machined and were ready for assembly.
Zhang Yi went over to help as well. It was not until the afternoon that the production line was fully assembled, and as soon as it was finished, they immediately began a trial run.
The production line ran for a little over an hour and performed very well without any errors. In just that hour, it had produced dozens of Aerodynamic Bicycles. The bicycles it produced were also of excellent quality, with no problems at all.
Zhang Yi then called over several trucks and shipped the five hundred Aerodynamic Bicycles to Fang Jie in Zhou Tai City.
Watching the trucks loaded with Aerodynamic Bicycles drive away, Zhang Yi was filled with confidence in the future. After all, this was only his first product. Now that it had succeeded, it was time for him to begin preparing his second product.
However, Zhang Yi had yet to decide what exactly the second product should be. Just then, he noticed that the production line, which had been running steadily moments earlier, had stopped. Xiao Hua and the others were already inspecting it.
"What happened? Is there some kind of design flaw in the production line?" Seeing the line stop, Zhang Yi walked over and asked Xiao Hua.
"Director Zhang, the design itself probably isn't the issue. Otherwise, it couldn't have run for this long. I think there may be another problem with this production line, but we'll have to wait until the inspection is complete to know for sure." Jia Qing, one of the designers of the production line, answered Zhang Yi's question.
Sure enough, Xiao Hua and the others quickly found the source of the problem.
"Director Zhang, as expected, the problem isn't with the production line's design. It's the bearings." As he spoke, Jia Qing handed over the bearing in his hand.
The bearings used in this production line were merely ordinary bearings rather than high-performance ones. After all, in a small place like Xian County, it was difficult to find genuinely high-performance bearings. Even if they could be found, they might be counterfeit or prohibitively expensive. Zhang Yi and the others had originally thought that this production line would not need high-performance bearings, since it did not run at particularly high speeds, though it did require greater precision. Yet they had never expected problems to arise anyway.
"It looks like ordinary bearings simply won't do. In less than two hours, the bearings on this production line have already failed." Zhang Yi could not help saying as he looked at the bearing in his hand.
But there was nothing they could do about that. Most domestic high-performance bearings were imported from overseas. There were very few domestically produced high-performance bearings, and their performance was far inferior to imported ones. They also had no real price advantage.
"Since this bearing has failed, are the other bearings on this production line also in bad shape? Let's open it up and take a look." Zhang Yi examined the bearing and found that the production line had only been running for a few hours, yet the one in his hand already had a large amount of play. There were even iron filings leaking out of it.
Very soon, they dismantled the key sections of the production line and removed all the bearings inside.
After inspecting them, Zhang Yi and the others found that all of the bearings had, to varying degrees, developed excessive play. Clearly, these bearings simply could not meet the requirements of the production line.
Now that they had found the problem, resolving it was much easier: they just needed to purchase high-performance bearings.
However, when Zhang Yi and the others arrived at the largest hardware store in their county, they discovered that those bearings were already the best the store had. If they wanted bearings with better performance, they would have to buy them at the machinery parts market in Zhou Tai City.
Left with no other choice, Zhang Yi and the others hurried to the machinery parts market in Zhou Tai City again the next day. There, they indeed found all kinds of high-performance bearings, including quite a few imported ones. However, whether they were domestically produced high-performance bearings or imported ones, their prices were extremely high. Still, the imported bearings performed far better.
For Zhang Yi and the others, naturally, the higher the performance, the better. Although his production line produced bicycles, these were no ordinary bicycles. Their precision requirements were simply not comparable to those of regular bicycles, especially the aerodynamic motors. And he did not want a repeat of what had happened yesterday.
Before you continue