Chapter 330: Cost of Iron

Arthur Pendelton stopped right in the conference room doorway, his face thunderous.

"Absolutely not."

Ernest looked up from the production proposal, pen in hand. "Good morning to you too, Arthur."

Arthur marched over, dropped a thick leather folder right on top of the engineering blueprints, and jabbed a finger at the title page:

PROPOSED INITIAL COMMERCIAL BATCH: 24 UNITS.

"Twenty-four tractors," Arthur said, counting on his fingers. "Twenty-four engines, twenty-four transmissions, twenty-four sets of giant steel wheels, and twenty-four distinct chances for this company to bleed money into the dirt."

Hollen sat across the table, leisurely blowing the steam off his morning tea. "Morning, Arthur."

"Don’t give me that innocent face, Hollen."

"I haven’t said a word."

"You were smirking."

"A man can’t smile at his friends?"

"Not when that smile means you’re backing Ernest’s wild ideas."

Ernest chuckled, pulling a chair out for him. "Sit down, Arthur. You’re right about the risks. That’s why we’re having this meeting."

Arthur pulled the chair back with a scrape and sat. "Good. Because I plan to make both of your lives miserable until we figure out how we’re actually paying for this."

Hollen grinned. "Just like the old days."

"What old days?"

"Back when Ernest and I scraped together pocket change just to buy raw iron for our first workshop."

Ernest glanced at the framed black-and-white photograph hanging on the wall. In it, a much younger Hollen stood in a soot-stained apron beside an equally young Ernest holding a rough steel gear. Back then, they worried about whether their single furnace would collapse by Friday.

"Neither of you learned a lick of caution since then, did you?" Arthur grumbled, cracking open his ledger. "Let’s talk numbers. The long-term plan targets a retail price of sixty-one thousand riels, assuming we build a hundred and twenty tractors a year."

"That’s the target," Ernest nodded.

"Right. But we’re not making a hundred and twenty. We’re making twenty-four." Arthur shoved an estimate sheet across the table. "At this volume, before tooling pays for itself, each machine will cost us roughly fifty-seven thousand eight hundred riels just to build. And that doesn’t count warranties, field service, or operator training."

"So if we sell them at sixty-one thousand," Hollen noted, "we basically break even or lose money on every unit."

"Exactly," Arthur said. "Unless we bump the introductory price."

Ernest frowned. "How much to make it safe?"

"Sixty-six to sixty-eight thousand riels."

"That’s steep," Ernest murmured. "A small cooperative can’t easily swing that."

"The first batch isn’t for small co-ops," Hollen pointed out quietly. "It’s for big estates, commercial contractors, and schools—folks who will run them into the ground and give us the operational data we need."

Ernest thought it over, then tapped the ledger. "Fine. Sixty-seven thousand for the first run, bundled with full training and a service contract. We keep it transparent. We don’t pretend the mass-production price is here yet."

"Sensible," Arthur jotted down a note. "Now, what about floor space? If you cannibalize the truck plant, I’ll walk out that door right now."

Hollen unrolled a floor plan of Plant One. "We use the old eastern fabrication bay. It’s got overhead cranes and direct rail siding. We can fit three assembly bays comfortably—four if we squeeze, but three keeps it safe."

"Machining?" Ernest asked. "The low-speed drive gears are heavy."

"That’s the real bottleneck," Hollen admitted. "Our gear cutters are already swamped with Cargo One parts. If we push tractor gears too fast, truck deliveries slip."

"Not happening," Ernest said firmly.

"Then we build in small batches," Hollen suggested. "Six tractors at a time. No assembly starts until every critical gear for that run passes inspection. Four runs of six."

Arthur looked up, surprised. "That’s... actually very reasonable."

"I have my moments," Hollen smirked.

By four in the afternoon, after half a dozen cups of cold tea and endless line-item checks, Arthur closed his folder.

"Three conditions," Arthur stated, holding up a finger. "First: no second batch until this run proves itself in the dirt. Second: buyers must understand these are first-generation machines. Third: no promising delivery dates we can’t guarantee."

Ernest reached for his fountain pen. "Deal."

At the bottom of the proposal, he wrote: Authorized: 24 Units.

Three days later, the eastern bay was cleared out. Hollen gathered the shop foremen in the empty hall.

"Listen up," Hollen told them, his voice echoing off the brick walls. "We aren’t hand-crafting prototypes here. These twenty-four need to be identical down to the millimeter. If a part doesn’t fit on machine number one, it better not fit on machine twenty-four."

The work began—and hit a wall almost immediately.

A delivery of cast iron housings arrived from an outside foundry. The receiving inspector took one look, measured the flanges with his calipers, and rejected four of them on the spot.

The supplier’s agent threw his hands in the air. "They’re within tolerance on the drawings!"

"After machining, they are," the inspector fired back. "Before machining, there’s not enough meat left on the bearing face. It’ll crack under heavy torque."

The shouting brought Hollen over. He wiped grease off his hands, checked the casting with his own gauge, and looked at the supplier.

"Send ’em back."

"Mr. Hollen, that will push your timeline back a whole week!"

Hollen set the heavy casting down with a dull thud. "Bad iron doesn’t turn into good iron just because we’re on a deadline. Cast them right, or we buy from someone else."

When Arthur heard about the delay, he didn’t even yell. He just adjusted the supplier billing and negotiated a penalty credit.

"A delay is a headache," Arthur told Ernest over coffee. "A tractor splitting in half in front of a paying client is a catastrophe."

Meanwhile, Arthur’s desk was buried under purchase requests. Not all of them were good.

One wealthy lord wrote in asking for a Fieldmaster painted in his family’s crest, fitted with a padded leather seat and polished brass lamps, and asked if the factory could make the exhaust "less vulgar" so he could parade it around garden parties.

Arthur brought the letter in, practically wheezing with laughter. "Shall we build Lord Wexford his carriage?"

"Tell him we build farm tools, not lawn ornaments," Ernest said with a groan.

Instead, they vetted buyers who had actual acres to turn. One of the first through the door was William Mercer, clutching his familiar black ledger.

"So," Mercer said, dropping into an armchair. "You’re finally selling the damned things."

"Sixty-seven thousand riels," Arthur told him straight out. "Includes spare belts, inspections, and hands-on driver training."

Mercer whistled through his teeth. "Ouch. That bites." He opened his ledger, tracing his finger down columns of fuel expenses and contractor fees. "Still... with the acres I’ve got booked for spring, another machine pays for itself by harvest. But I have a bigger problem than the price."

"What’s that?" Ernest asked.

"Drivers," Mercer said. "I can buy iron. I can’t buy a man who knows how to run it without stripping the gears. My current man can’t be in two fields at once."

Ernest leaned forward. "Send your best farmhand to Plant One. We’ll train him ourselves before the tractor ships."

Mercer looked at him, surprised. "You’ll teach a farm boy how to handle your engines?"

"If he doesn’t know how to run it, our machine fails," Ernest said. "Send him over."