Bear on the hood
The production line of heavy three-axle trucks was brought to Kremenchuk from the Yaroslavl Automobile Plant, the history of which goes back to the pre-revolutionary 1916. Then the industrialist Vladimir Aleksandrovich Lebedev opened one of the first automobile plants in Russia, aimed at satisfying defense orders. It was planned to produce one and a half of the British brand "Crossley", but all the cards were mixed up by the civil war, after which the plant turned into a leading manufacturer of heavy trucks for the army and the national economy of the Soviet Union.
The most interesting for the "Kremenchug" theme is 1944, when the enterprise received the name of the Yaroslavl Automobile Plant and began to develop a new family of trucks. It is important that for the first time a diesel engine was chosen as a power unit for serial trucks, for the production of which machines and equipment were purchased in the USA. As a prototype, the overseas two-stroke diesel General Motors GMC 4-71 was taken as a basis - it was a four-cylinder unit with water cooling and a working volume of 4654 cubic meters. see Power he developed in 112 hp. and in 1947 he first got under the hood of a 7-ton YaAZ-200 (a copy of the US GMC-803). This car subsequently "went" to Minsk, where it became the ancestor of a whole generation of MAZ trucks.
I must say that the American diesels mastered in 1946 were quite progressive engines for their time. They were compact, had good performance in terms of power density and economy, but they were demanding on the level of qualifications of both production workers and service personnel. In addition, two-stroke diesel engines were noisy mercilessly and weighed 800 kilograms. Over time, a six-cylinder version of the American GMC 6-71 diesel engine was mastered in Yaroslavl, which was named YaAZ-206A and developed 165 hp. with. It was he who became the heart of the heavy three-axle Yaroslavl YaAZ-210, the design of which for many years became the standard for future trucks from Kremenchug. In particular, the engineers equipped the truck with a heavy and durable frame, the spars of which were made from hot-rolled sections (channels) using low-alloy chromium-containing steels. The frame was made solid, but the driver's working conditions seemed to be the last thing to think: the steering of these three-axle heroes did not have an amplifier. To understand how important the Yaroslavl 12-ton trucks were for the Soviet and partially the world industry, one can give an example of a Vietnamese 5 dong banknote, which depicts a YaAZ-210E dump truck at work.
Also in this line of special interest is the ancestor of modern tank carriers - the ballast tractor YAZ-210G. This version received a shortened base and a metal platform copied from the American Diamond T-980 for 8 tons of ballast. The tractor dragged a trailer with a total weight of up to 30 tons and, up to a certain point, satisfied the military. However, the lack of all-wheel drive and small angles of mutual misalignment of the rear axles required good quality roads for the movement of a military truck. Taking into account the many requirements of the Ministry of Defense, at the turn of the 50s, in Yaroslavl, they began to develop a new truck with a 6x6 wheel arrangement.
They took the front drive axle from the ZIL-164 as a basis, equipped it with a two-stage gearbox and constant velocity joints, and also made significant changes to the transfer case. The designers of YaAZ did not follow the path of their colleagues from Moscow, who left double tires on the rear axles on the ZIS-151, but installed single wheels of large diameter. These were tires of the Trilex type, and the nearby Yaroslavl Tire Plant was involved in their development. Trilex is a cross-sectional discless rim, consisting of three sectors: one large and two small, connected by the shaped ends of the side flanges. The latter also served as locking devices. When mounted with a tire, the clearance wheel 15.00-20.00 has a rigid structure. There was no tire pressure control system on the car, which somewhat reduced the all-terrain performance on soft soils. For a heavy and four-wheel drive truck, the former 165 hp diesel. with. was clearly weak, so a forced version of the YaAZ-206B with 205 hp was developed. with. There is a more spacious cabin with heating, pneumatic power steering and even a device for blowing the windshield.
The chief designer of the new army YaAZ was Viktor Vasilyevich Osepchugov, who chose for the truck, which received the index "214", a transmission design, which is largely a compromise. Naturally, since the car was built on the basis of American concepts, it received separate cardan shafts for all bridges - then there was no talk of any through bridges. A similar transmission, by the way, had a ZIL-157, also built according to overseas patterns.
As mentioned above, the car retained an upgraded transfer case from the YaAZ-210G, an interaxle differential and a bogie of two rear axles, and a novelty was the attachment to the transfer case with a switchable drive to the front axle. When moving unevenness between the first and second driving axles, there were "parasitic" loads that could not be leveled by the differential - it simply was not there. At the same time, I repeat, there was a differential between the rear axles. Viktor Osepchugov had to make this compromise due to difficulties in mastering new technology: at the Yaroslavl plant they held on to a complex in production unit “transfer case - center differential”.
The car went into production in 1957. Such a primitive KrAZ drive scheme was preserved for another 30 years. And a year earlier, in the vicinity of Yaroslavl, YaAZ-214 passed the last tests, organized for reasons of secrecy at night. Also at night, brand new trucks were transferred by rail under tents to the Moscow arms exhibition, where the king of Afghanistan, Mohammed Zahir Shah, really liked the three-axle giant. Nikita Khrushchev immediately ordered to collect 10 cars in the experimental workshop of the plant using a bypass technology and send them to Kabul as a gift.
Despite the fact that the diesel engine on the YaAZ-214 was a very convincing power of 205 liters. with., the 7-ton truck turned out to be too heavy even for him. In the equipped state on the scales, it showed 12, 3 tons! YaAZ-214 was a huge, clumsy and slow-moving machine (maximum speed no more than 55 km / h), which was nicknamed "automobile tractor" in the army. The truck was able, depending on road conditions, to haul trailers from 15 to 50 tons. If we compare the dimensions of the truck with contemporaries, then only the career MAZ-525 was taller and wider than the Yaroslavl hero, but he also lost to the all-terrain vehicle in length.
Nevertheless, the car turned out to be in great demand both in the troops and in the national economy, which caused a problem - the area and capacity of YaAZ did not allow expanding the production of the entire line of trucks. In 1959, it was decided to transfer the entire production of heavy trucks from Yaroslavl to Kremenchug, where they had never assembled automotive equipment before. In total, before moving to Ukraine, YaAZ assembled 1265 army all-wheel drive trucks, among which there were many special versions. One of these was the reinforced chassis YaAZ-214SH-7, assembled for the installation of advanced missile weapons. The truck, already overweight with various amplifiers, was additionally equipped with more durable units, a winch and power take-off shafts for driving special superstructure equipment. Also in Yaroslavl, by special order of the Ministry of Defense, single copies of the 214th vehicle with a fifth wheel from MAZ-200V were assembled.
Kremenchug meets YaAZ
The city of Kremenchuk in the Poltava region of the Ukrainian SSR was never associated with cars, and even more so with heavy trucks, until the end of the 50s. Nevertheless, there were facilities and areas for industrial production in the city. In 1945, the People's Commissar of Railways of the USSR signed an order on the construction of a plant for the production of bridges in Kremenchug. After the German invasion, the country urgently needed to build new bridges to replace the destroyed ones and organize ferry crossings. In 1948, the plant started to work and mastered the methods of production that were advanced for their period. For example, for the first time it was in Kremenchug that submerged-arc welding was introduced among bridge builders using the method of the legendary Paton. By the way, the famous welded Paton Bridge in Kiev was not created without the participation of craftsmen from Kremenchug - a 600-ton railings were cast at the plant. The portfolio of the bridge-building production of the future KrAZ includes the Arbat bridge in Moscow, bridges across the Volga, Dnieper and Vistula, ferry crossings of the Kerch Strait and the Belomor-Baltic Canal. In total, the enterprise assembled 607 bridges with a total length of 27 kilometers, on which 104 thousand tons of metal were spent. But by 1953, most of the bridges in the Soviet Union had been restored, and the plant was in dire need of orders. After three years of stagnation, the enterprise came to the rescue … Nikita Khrushchev, who declared corn the main agricultural crop in the country. In 1956, the Kremenchug plant became a combine plant. The main product on the conveyor was the KU-2A corn harvester, the production of which came to the plant from Rostselmash. Naturally, it was necessary to retrain the plant personnel, recruit new specialists (the staff was increased by 1958 to 4 thousand people) and expand production. In the combine production, in a short time, 14 thousand KU-2A units, about 5 thousand beet-harvesting machines, 874 road rollers, 4 thousand carts for breaking beet, 24 thousand tractor wheels and several other items of small agricultural machinery were assembled.
On April 17, 1958, when the corn hysteria began to subside, it was decided to create on the basis of the Kremenchug plant a huge enterprise for the assembly of huge Yaroslavl trucks intended primarily for the army. This was the largest transformation of the production cycle at the plant in its entire existence. Firstly, it was required to allocate 20 thousand square meters for new workshops, and secondly, to place in them about 1,500 pieces of equipment both from YaAZ and completely new. Since the plant in Yaroslavl was completely redesigned into motor production, many automotive engineers moved to the future KrAZ. They subsequently formed the backbone of the design headquarters of the Ukrainian plant. The head of the KrAZ testing department Leonid Vinogradov wrote in this regard:
It was in 1958. I then worked at the Yaroslavl Automobile Plant, headed a group for fine-tuning machines. And suddenly the news comes: it was decided to transfer the production of trucks to Ukraine - to Kremenchug, to a former combine plant. And in Yaroslavl, due to this, to expand the production of engines … What should I do? How to live without your favorite cars? He waved his hand at everything and left for Kremenchug. So I have been at this factory since the first days. And I'm not the only one. A whole group of us arrived from Yaroslavl, began to settle in a new place. I started working in an experimental workshop. As a matter of fact, there was no shop as such at first. It still needed to be created. We bought for him the most modern equipment at that time, including abroad. And the workshop, in terms of its technical equipment and capabilities, turned out to be, as they say, at the level.
