The high-voltage circuit breaker at Node Forty-Two was not a switch in any domestic sense.
It was a massive piece of heavy clockwork ordnance, housed within a blast-heavy granite bunker twenty feet deep.
At the center of the vault stood the switch blade. A forty-foot blade of sintered heavy dark metal-copper alloy weighing fourteen tons.
The blade had been cast in Borin’s high-heat hydrogen sintering retorts, combining seventy percent heavy dark metal for arc pushback with thirty percent copper for spark flow rate.
It was ground to a razor edge and polished with diamond paste until it mirrored the amber electric lights.
The stationary jaw contacts were forged from high-flow rate beryllium copper. It was backed by heavy chrome-vanadium leaf springs.
Master Borin Bronze-Lung walked along the switch narrow high walkway. He carried an oiler can and a hair-width depth gauge.
Beside him, four dwarven smiths in leather aprons wiped the heavy dark metal contact faces with silk rags dipped in pure alcohol.
