After another cruel workday, Kaan slept like a log. He woke up feeling great; it was his only day off, so he immediately went around looking for things to buy.
"Alright, first I need a basket so I can collect the mud, and I need a hammer in order to shape the sheet metals," he thought, planning his day. "After that, I will start the real work."
He visited several shops. He found a hammer so worn you could nearly see the handle, and he bought a cheap notebook and pen to detail his plans. Next, Kaan stopped at a metal workshop to buy some lead, knowing he would need it for soldering later.
"Good, I have about ten Therums left. Let's head to the warehouse and see what we can do."
He started walking to the warehouse, stopping at the riverside to collect some river mud, and then at a nearby barn to collect some sewage and get hay.
"Alright, let's make the insulation first," he muttered. "Mix up the mud and sewage, and add some hay to it."
"Blegh! As expected." The stench of cow dung was strong, "But I remember in my village we built an oven with this, so it should be easy."
He quickly fabricated the valves that were missing from the engine and replaced the broken parts. Before applying the insulation, he decided to test the machine.
"Come on, big boy, you can do this." WROM! .... WROM!! PSSS.
"Ah, what broke now?" He checked the machine again and found the problem: a piston that was so worn out it looked like a spear. He made a quick trip to the junkyard to look for the part.
He paid for the part and came back to the warehouse. "That hurt, eight Therums for a piston. That's expensive."
He quickly replaced the part with a crude wrench he made from scraps around the warehouse.
WROM! .... WROM!.. BUM BUM BUM BUM BUM BUM...
"YES! IT WORKS!"
Now, what was left was to drill a hole into the side of the piston chamber to make way for the condensing room. He found a primitive hand-drill in the warehouse and started drilling. Eek, eek, eek, eek.
"Well, that was easier than I thought."
As he went to make the transport pipe, he hit another wall. "How am I going to make this leakproof?"
He started experimenting with water and the example pipe he found. He tried covering it with mud, but it didn't work well enough. Just as he was about to give up, he remembered something. "I think I can use that."
He grabbed the lead he had bought, put it into a pot to melt, and made wire-shaped molds from mud. After the molds dried up, he poured the molten lead into the wire castings.
DING!
Congratulations. You are the first person in this dimension to discover soldering wire (crude). [1]
You will be rewarded extra when you return to your home dimension.
"?" Kaan thought. "Aren't you out of power, you damned thing?"
"Let's focus." He grabbed a burning piece of wood, started to melt the newly fabricated lead soldering wire into the small cracks of the example pipe. He waited for it to cool down and grabbed some sandpaper to smooth it.
"Nice, it works!"
For the heat insulation, he used some more of the mud-sewage-hay composition on the pipe and tested it with boiling water. Shrrrrrrrr. No leaks. "NICE!" he yelled.
Afterwards, he started to make the copper tube that would connect the steam engine with the condensing room. CLING, CLING, CLING...
He soldered the connection point of the tube, since he couldn't weld, and looked at his masterpiece with pride.
"I am a genius, a skilled craftsman."
Meanwhile, outside:
"What the hell is this guy doing? I think he went crazy. I need to report this to the boss," the watching worker muttered.
[1] It is crude because soldering wires have a tin-lead alloy