This is a close copy of a Caterpillar D-7 or RD-7. It`s the old style injection pump so I`m guessing RD-7 of around 1936 vintage. Does anyone know if Caterpillar supplied tooling to the USSR to build these?
Great old machine! There are still D-7 Cats of this vintage earning their keep.
Michael,
I have an interesting article from 1952 which recounts how two Russian Stalinetz 80 crawler tractors were captured in Korea and eventually taken to Peoria for inspection. Caterpillar reckoned they were probably copied from D7 Lend-Lease machines sent to Russia around 1942. They said they were well-made, re-drawn to metric dimensions, a bit rough on the outside, but precise where it mattered. The materials were good - "The Russians know where to make parts hard and where to make them tough. Hardness and toughness of their parts are about the same as we use". They concluded that the Russian tractors would have a slightly shorter working life than the real thing.
Having said that - I have a book (published 2001) with about 35 pages on Russian crawler tractors. The writer says "Russia has been probably the largest manufacturer of crawler tractors in the world".
Apparently the first crawler tractor in Europe was invented by a Russian in 1888. It was steam-powered.
What this book shows is a vast range of crawler tractors, probably not copied from anyone in my opinion. Russia did copy the Fordson tractor in the 1920's and the Cat 60, RD7 and D7 in the 1930's-40's, but that doesn't mean they weren't also producing there own designs. For example the Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant which built the Stalinets and other crawlers was also the largest manufacturer of tanks in the world during WW2, building the T-34 and other tanks, not to mention about 48,000 diesel tank engines. As far as I know those tank diesel engines were a Russian design and pretty good.
The author does note that the 1940's D7 basic engine design was still being produced in the 1990's.
There are diesel-electric drives, electric-mechanical drives, and diesel-hydraulic drive machines, track suspension among others designs. For example the ChTz (same company that made the Stalinets) DET-250 was/is? a large 300 hp crawler with V-12 diesel, electro-mechanical transmission, suspension, central control and had been produced for over 40 years when this book was published. It is an interesting-looking machine!
Here are some of the different Russian crawler manufacturers listed in the 2001 book I have (includes Ukraine, Moldavia, Georgia, Belarus, Kazakhstan).
-Altai ATZ
-Brianskii BAZ
-Cheboksary/Promtractor (who were offering a 750 hp machine in 1991).
-Cheliabinsk-Stalinets
-Cheliabinsk-ChTZ
-Kharkov
-Kirovets
-Kishinev KTZ
-Kommounar
-Koutaisskii
-Lipetskii LTZ
-Minsk MTZ
-Onejskii OTZ
-Pavlodar PTZ
-Stalingrad, became Volgograd 1961, later Volgar
edit: I found this website for the Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant (ChTZ Uraltrak), who made the "crawler in the swamp":
История - Челябинский Тракторный Завод (ЧТЗ)