Automatic line of Rostselmash
History collectivization was connected at one end with the history of mechanical engineering, since the plan envisaged the saturation of agriculture, in particular state farms, machine-tractor stations and collective farms, with various equipment. This equipment still had to be produced, and in this matter for a country in which large-scale flow-type mechanical engineering was only just developing, there were serious difficulties.
However, there were achievements in this. Thus, the first automatic lines in the USSR were connected precisely with agricultural engineering. Many have heard about Inochkin's line for processing parts of the NATI-A crawler tractor at the Stalingrad Tractor Plant, but it seems that little is known about the fact that Rostselmash created its own automatic line before the war. Moreover, this line had its own specifics.
"Stalinets-1"
Order of Lenin, Order of the October Revolution, Order of the Red Banner of Labor and Order of Honor Rostselmash Combine Plant LLC exists and operates to this day, having survived numerous upheavals. The plant issued its first products on July 21, 1929; at that time, plows, seeders, and binders were manufactured. Soon, the nature of production changed dramatically, and the plant switched to the production of combines. The first of them rolled off the assembly line on January 24, 1932.
Easy to write, but hard to do. The plant was originally designed to produce horse-drawn agricultural machinery, but it was necessary to produce trailed agricultural machinery. The plant design was radically redesigned twice, and four more times small but large-scale changes were made.
At the same time, the first combine harvester was being designed by a group of engineers: I. I. Zimin, P. I. Guryanov and A. A. Yakovenko. The work began in the fall of 1929. The prototypes were American, but Soviet engineers largely took their own path. In particular, the first prototype "Kolkhoz" was developed as a universal one and could harvest not only grain crops, but also sunflower, corn and millet. In the summer of 1930, "Kolkhoz" passed comparative tests with American analogues and was soon slightly improved. The new version was called "Stalinets". Subsequently, several more advanced modifications were developed on its basis, so the first version was called "Stalinets-1".
"Stalinets-1" on display at the Rostselmash Museum
The combine was trailed, that is, it was towed across the field by a tractor, but at the same time it had its own engine to drive the 6,7-meter-wide header, thresher and other mechanisms. On self-propelled combines, the header is placed in front, and on trailed combines it was located on the side, in this case on the right in the direction of travel. The combine combines cutting of ears, their threshing and separation of grain from straw and chaff.
The adherents of the "Holodomor" theory have always found it difficult to explain, from the point of view of their views, the appearance of the combine harvester on Soviet fields. They can be helped a little with this. The combine harvester must have been a means of mechanized robbery of the peasants. If the peasants were forced to reap grain with sickles or scythes, they would, at any moment, scatter a handful of ears of corn into their pockets. With the combine, all the grain, bypassing the hungry mouths of the collective farmers, disappears into the iron belly of this machine, and from there straight into the bottomless granaries of the state. The "Holodomor" adherents did not yet have this thesis? Well, they still need to be consistent in their worldview, even if it reaches the point of absurdity.
If we put aside the cynical mockery about the "Holodomor", which can easily be brought to the point of absurdity, then the importance of combines can be expressed in numbers. Once in the Chkalovsk region (this was most likely 1939 or 1940), two "Stalinets-1" combines in a hitch harvested 6012 hectares. The same work would have required 1637 people, 373 horses, 25 reapers, 25 threshers, 25 winnowers, 40 sorters. If harvesting by hand, 3323 people would have been needed. The combine was serviced by five people on the machine, one on the hauler and one on the tractor. A total of 7 people.
"Stalinets" are hitched. The header is fixed rigidly, using a spacer pipe, its far end is equipped with a field wheel. The second combine can be hitched to a hook located behind the field wheel of the header of the first combine.
The Stalinets-1 was good; during its production period from 1932 to October 1941, 56 thousand combines of this type were produced.
Automatic line
But there was one bottleneck in the production of this remarkable combine, which forced the development of an automatic line. Since the reaper or header was located on the Stalinets-1 on the side of the combine, there was a need for a conveyor that would transfer the mown ears to the thresher. Structurally, this was a sheet of very strong fabric, along the edges of which were laid belts riveted with rivets, and wooden planks located 25,5 cm apart.
This photo clearly shows the conveyor in the header, which presented many problems in its production.
In order to assemble the web of this conveyor, it was necessary to punch 520 holes, install 520 rivets, 65 strips and 390 cup washers. All this was done manually. There were 100 workers in the web department, and their strength was not enough to provide the combines with web, without which they could not work. As production grew, this bottleneck became more and more noticeable. As a result, electrical engineer N. V. Yatskovsky and mechanical engineer S. A. Sakhansky took on the development of an automatic line that could solve this problem.
It took a fair amount of ingenuity, but they managed to design, build, and get the line up and running. The machine produced 8 sheets in an 370-hour shift, which would have required 900 workers in the sheet department to make them by hand.
The engineers divided the entire process into separate stages, placed sequentially, which were performed by machines. The web was placed on a conveyor with a pitch of 225 mm, moving at a certain rate.
The first stop was to punch holes, for which 8 devices were installed, four on each side.
The second stop was the installation of rivets. Rivets from a bunker, into which they were poured in bulk, were fed into a rotating drum, from there into catchers with grooves, and from there into magazines, from which they were put into place.
The third stop was installing cup washers on rivets. For these washers, a hopper with an oval bottom was designed, in the center of which there was a slot for the washer on the edge. After this slot, the washer passed the wheel with blades, and from there into the washer guide. Before installing the washers, two control holes were passed to be installed correctly.
The fourth stop is the installation of the planks, which were previously fed through two conveyors with sorting by position; on the first, the plank passed only in the flat position, on the second - only with the rounded side up.
The fifth stop is riveting, for which 8 hammers were installed, four on each side.
Then the canvas was nailed to the planks using a special nailing machine.
The line was developed in late 1939 – early 1940 and was definitely operational in the summer of 1940. In any case, S. M. Strakhov’s brochure, in which this line was described as operational, was submitted to the printers on October 25, 1940, meaning the manuscript was prepared sometime in September of that year. This line operated for a little over a year until the evacuation of Rostselmash began in October 1941. What happened to this line is unknown. It is possible that it was simply abandoned during the evacuation.
Rostselmash transported 3500 wagons of evacuation cargo to Tashkent and Chirchik, taking mainly foundry, forging and pressing, and metal-cutting equipment. In Uzbekistan, the plant, like many other agricultural machinery plants, produced strictly military products: 82-mm and 120-mm mines, 50-kg, 100-kg, and 250-kg aerial bombs. After the liberation of Rostov on February 14, 1943, the plant gave its first products on February 23 of the same year, also military.
Immediately after its liberation, Rostselmash was a pile of ruins.
The plant produced ammunition, repaired equipment and returned to combines only in 1947. "Stalinets-6" - the first post-war combine, was also a trailed one with a side-mounted reaper. In theory, it should also have had the same conveyor. However, it was not possible to find out for sure whether the post-war "Rostselmash" had an automatic line for the production of canvases. This is how we value our own achievements.
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