Panoramic windows and bonnet layout
As mentioned in the first part of the story, one of the most characteristic and paradoxical signs of a military truck was a curved panoramic windshield. At first, the Ministry of Defense expressed their discontent with this fact in a rather restrained manner, but during the Afghan conflict, the issue became very acute. In July 1982, in a joint decision of the Ministry of the Automotive Industry and the Central Automobile and Tractor Directorate of the USSR Ministry of Defense, it was said:
“Many years of experience in the operation of ZIL-130 and ZIL-131 vehicles in the army has shown that the current cab design with a panoramic windshield significantly complicates the repair of vehicles, as well as the transportation and storage of glasses of this type. The indicated lack of glazing of the cabins of ZIL vehicles is especially acute in the case of column movement in mountainous conditions in an environment of fire."
In accordance with these conclusions, the plant workers carried out a cycle of tests of the upgraded ZIL-4334 machines equipped with flat windshields. By the way, in addition to simplifying operation, flat multi-piece glasses made it possible to solve the problem of heat-insulating glazing of trucks in the "northern" version. However, flat glass turned out to be a virtually unsolvable task for the Moscow Automobile Plant - this entailed both the complication of the cab design and serious financial costs. So, according to calculations in 1982, the development of a new cabin and glazing required some fantastic costs of 1,550,000 rubles, as well as an additional 700 sq. M. meters of production area. Actually, the financial side of the issue made it possible to break the will of the Ministry of Defense in this matter.
In an effort to unify the army truck with the civilian ZIL-130, the designers left the bonnet layout of the car unchanged. This was done primarily in order to maximize the speed of the production of machines of both modifications on the production lines of the plant. The country sorely lacked cars of this class, and, for example, the army was able to get enough of 131 ZILs only by the mid-70s. In this regard, one of the most important advantages of the ZIL-131 three-axle bonnet truck is its resistance to detonation under the wheels of anti-vehicle mines. Below I offer a selection of photographs illustrating this thesis.
Triumph and unfulfilled hopes
In the Soviet Army, the ZIL-131 truck by the mid-70s had already won the fame of a reliable, unpretentious and all-passable transport. In many ways, this was the reason for the awarding of the Quality Mark to the entire line of Moscow all-wheel drive vehicles in April 1974. The national economy was also satisfied - since 1971, a simplified version of the machine without expensive shielded equipment under the name ZIL-131A was put on the conveyor. A little earlier, in 1968, a truck tractor with a shortened frame 131B appeared, capable of pulling a single-axle semi-trailer with a total weight of 12 tons.
Around the same time, a largely unique ZIL-137 tractor with a hydrostatic drive of the semi-trailer wheels was designed and adopted. The machine was additionally equipped with a hydraulic pump driven by a power take-off box, which makes it possible to supply oil to the semi-trailer hydraulic motor with a pressure of 150 kgf / cm2… At the end of the 60s, the assembly of a unique car was transferred to the Bryansk Automobile Plant, where an average of 30 such cars were assembled per month. They carried mostly rockets on such ZILs (for example, the 2K11 Krug air defense missile system), but often one could see the 137th car with a long bakery block AHB-2, 5. This plant on wheels was capable of baking at least 2, 5 tons of bread, even while moving on the march. However, the capricious and complex hydraulic motor of the semi-trailer forced the engineers to develop a more reliable and technologically advanced mechanical drive. This is how the 60091 road train appeared with the ZIL-4401 tractor with the BAZ-99511 semi-trailer, produced from 1982 to 1994. The road train consumed 53 liters of gasoline per 100 kilometers, made it possible to load more than 7 tons and found its application in the missile forces, air defense and on the bakery path. Since the beginning of the 80s, the “northern” versions of the ZIL-131C were put into production at the Chita car assembly plant, which had to withstand temperatures down to -60 ° C. Since 1986, the assembly of such frost-resistant cars has been moved to his native Moscow Automobile Plant.
Due to the long introduction into production, the car quickly became obsolete and required modernization. The delay in the development of the car was due to the protracted reconstruction of the enterprise, as well as chronic shortages of units from the Bryansk Automobile Plant. The normal assembly of the ZIL-131 was organized only in the second half of 1967, that is, twelve years after the assembly of the first prototypes! One of the attempts to improve the truck was the development in 1976 of the ZIL-131-77, in which the main emphasis was placed on improving the driver's working conditions. The object of unification was the KAMAZ car - the steering wheel, instrument cluster and seats were borrowed from it. In addition, the cargo platform was slightly lowered, but the kinematics of the suspension were not taken into account, and when the wheels were diagonally hung, they often touched the body. In the end, nothing good came of this idea - the prototype was refined for a very long time and in the end was abandoned.
If you ask anyone who has operated the ZIL-131 about the main drawback of the car, then most often you can hear a complaint about excessive fuel consumption. In the army, of course, it was possible to put up with this (although no one canceled the power reserve as one of the most important parameters), but in the civilian sphere and in the export markets, a diesel engine was required from the very beginning. Only ten years later from the start of production, they tried to supply a V-shaped diesel engine YaMZ-642, and in 1979 the Finnish "Valmer-411BS", but, as in the case of the ZIL-131-77, the prototypes remained without a series. But in the 78th year, the ZIL-131M appeared, equipped with a self-developed ZIL-6451 diesel engine with eight cylinders, a volume of 8, 74 liters and a capacity of 170 liters. with. Isn't it a perfect truck? Moreover, outwardly, it did not differ significantly from the production car - the hood was slightly lengthened (by the way, the development theme was also called the “Hood”) and additional headlights were installed. And with fully filled tanks, the power reserve of the diesel ZIL-131M was a gigantic 1180 km! Around the same time, another version of a truck with a ZIL-375 gasoline engine with a capacity of 170 liters appeared. with. In this version, the engineers managed to significantly increase the power and torque of the engine with comparable fuel consumption.
Truck "N"
On December 5, 1986, the well-deserved truck still waited for serial modernization and appeared in an updated form with the letter "N". A more economical 150-horsepower ZIL-5081 engine was installed on the new product, which is distinguished by a block head with a screw inlet channel and a compression ratio increased to 7, 1. An important innovation was the increased carrying capacity of 3, 75 tons, which brought the truck very close to the niche of 5- and 6-ton KamAZ trucks. By the way, from cars from Naberezhnye Chelny, an awning made of new synthetic materials was switched to the modernized ZIL. Simultaneously with the onboard version, the ZIL-131NV truck tractor (together with the "northern" 131NVS) was developed.
The appearance of the updated ZIL in the army did not meet with much enthusiasm - firstly, there was disarmament, and secondly, many of the functions of a gasoline truck were perfectly performed by the mentioned diesel KamAZ and Urals. In addition, in 1990 at ZIL, the "N" series car was removed from production and began to prepare capacities for the new model. Since 1987, the modernized ZIL has been assembled in parallel with Moscow in Novouralsk (Sverdlovsk Region) at the Ural Automobile Plant. We have known it since 2004 as the Amur enterprise - it has assembled an extremely diverse collection of trucks based on ZILs with various types of drives and a wide range of motors. In 2010, a plant in the Urals was closed due to bankruptcy, and three years later, production at one of the oldest enterprises in the automotive industry, the Likhachev plant, was permanently stopped. You can argue for a long time about the reasons for the death of the once legendary plant, but for you and me it will largely be associated with the military model ZIL-131. In total, the plant assembled 998,429 copies of unpretentious army vehicles, while from 1987 to 2006, together with Amur, 52,349 trucks entered the market. A typical representative of the 131st family in the Soviet Army was an on-board tent truck that could accommodate 18-24 personnel, often with a small or medium-caliber cannon attached. However, the universal "caliber" ZIL-131 made it possible to install just an infinite number of bodies on its basis and develop a lot of versions. But this is a topic for a separate story.
The end follows …
