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Russian Stalinetz C65 WW-II tractor ?

tim9lives

Hot Rolled
Joined
Dec 28, 2010
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new orleans
Found this video of pulling a WW-II TRACTOR out of swamp. I’m clueless as to what’s going on but read a post where someone says they thought they found a T-34 tank but when diver came up he told them it’s a world war 2 era tractor.
I first thought they get it running but now not so sure. First 45 minutes is just pulling it out. Start at about the 45 min mark
YouTube
 
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.
 
It looked like one of those old Cats to me also. But being no expert of tractors, I just figured that the Russians copied what we were making. Seems standard operating procedures for Communists Countries....just look around and see whose making best products, and they say to the hell with intellectual property. Russia and China have been doing that for decades.
There’s even a funny story of how they were stealing the space shuttle technology during the Cold War. US found out so they fed disinformation.
The Soviet Union ended up with what appeared to be an exact copy of our space shuttle. But the devil was in the details. It had so many flaws in it because counterintelligence fed them garbage info on the heat shield. Damned thing only flew one time.
How the Soviet space shuttle fizzled - Technology & science - Space | NBC News
 
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)
 
No doubt that Russia made some good tractors. And damned good T-34 WW-II tanks.
Yes but it was the Soviet Union. The T-34 tanks were cramped and the Soviets conscripted the shorter Mongols, far east men,to operate them.
There has to be special place for those pulled away from shepherding to manage oily stinking hot tracked machinery. Hundreds miles. More to remember not what tank but who operated them. Nary a clue but it must have been torture. On a good day when annihilating the nazi frozen weapons, what rings to this day? How in the f'ing world did it have to come to that?
 
Sept/October Antique Caterpillar Machinery Owners Club issue 141 magazine
has an a piece on the Stalinets 80s and how they were copies of the D7
Crude on the outside but right up to par where its counts. plus some interesting improvements. like a 2 cylinder cutout at idle for fuel conservation

Also I belive Lombard shipped one steam crawler to Russia also, Terry may be able to confirm that too.

I went threw a Warranty Reporting class earlier this year and was informed that one of the tec centers for Warranty Was in Russia too.
We helped them win the war and they are sniping at my repair times...
I cant win......
 








 
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