'Spirit of the craftsman' needed to produce better products

Here is a collection of stories about the spirit of the craftsman.

A screen grab of Gao Fenglin doing welding work on a rocket engine. [Photo/CNTV]

Making the 'heart' for rocket

Gao Fenglin, 53, is a senior technician from China Aerospace Science and Technology corporation. He has spent the last 35 years welding rocket engine nozzles. There are several thousand void tubes on the engine nozzle of the Long March 5 Series Launch Vehicle, each of which requires a meticulous molder about 0.16 mm in width.

More than 130 Long March series rockets have been propelled into the space by the engines that he welded, and this number accounts for more than half of the total number of Long March rockets.

A screen grab of Gao Fenglin doing "Zanke". [Photo/CNTV]

The master engraver

Meng Jianfeng is a senior technician of Beijing Gongmei Group. He is an artisan in the traditional Chinese art of "Zanke" , which means incising a design onto a hard metal surface, by cutting grooves into it.

Some of the silver and gold-engraved platters he made were presented as diplomatic gifts for leaders who attended the APEC summit in 2014.

With great effort, he engraves millions of grooves on a 0.6-millimeter silver slice. Meng has also produced about 30 different engraving tools by himself. The smallest one he worked on took five days using a magnifying glass.

"Every day after I go home, I turn the problems over and over in my mind until very late. How can I make these engraving tools and how to process them? Like everyone says, I even think about it even in my sleep," Meng said.

Hu Shuangqian teaches students at Beijing Industry and Trade Technicians College, in Beijing, May 28, 2015. [Photo/Xinhua]

Crafing parts of airplanes

Hu Shuangxian is the senior locksmith in Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China Ltd. His work is to grind, drill and polish the important parts, to make them fit into a bigger machinery parts. Although most of the work in the company is done by a computerized numerical control workshop, but for those modifications that hadn't been programmed, or for adjustments that require high precision, the work can only be done by Hu's delicate hands.

In the past 35 years, he has processed more than hundreds of thousands of aircraft parts.

See these people in other countries who carry out the spirit of the craftsman