Thread: Examples of The Russian Way

Hi Ray,

Reading your post reminded me of what I got told as a young bloke by a very old, very grumpy engineer, "Forget that design book, put some guts into it boy, go and do it again, In the middle of the night those blokes will try to lift the entire machine off its foundations".

Suffice to say he was right, as always, safety factor of 2, ha!, woosie design, put some empirical guts into it. We also had some very large Russian lathes and milling machines, enormous they were, but they did what the other more highly engineered machines could not do. Just simple engineering and unbrakeable.

Cheers
Pops

Yes

The WW2 Stormovik aircraft is a classic example . It was rugged to the extreme . Easy to fly for inexperienced crews .

The pilot was surrounded by a armoured plate module , it formed a part of the airframe struture , a unique idea .

With around 40,000 built it is estimated it is the most numerous produced aircraft of all time . Only the Cessna would beat it .

It would typically attack at very low altitude , thus many were lost to ground fire

Mike

The AK-47 is probably the most successful military weapon due to its ruggedness, simplicity and reliability.

MIR would be another example, it was the space race's Energiser Bunny.

The Russians can do elegant too.
I worked for a while with a South African engineer. For some reason we were discussing helicopter gunships and their machine guns. For the weapon to be effective they need to spray the projectiles around a bit more than they would normally come out of the barrel. The US solution? a electromechanical servo system that would move the barrel around while firing to spray the rounds. The Soviet solution? make the resonant frequency of the barrel the same as the firing speed of the weapon. The barrel will start moving around by itself.
That is such an elegant solution.

Michael

When a group of terrorists take over a theatre taking 850 hostages the russian way is to gas everyone and kill a fair number of hostages in the process...

I thought the russian way was just like the normal way only with WAY too much vodka. I think up until about 10 years ago some people still got paid in vodka.

Originally Posted by RayG

The American high tech zero gravity pen versus the Russian pencil.

But what did they learn from making a pencil?

Jordan

Originally Posted by nadroj

But what did they learn from making a pencil?

Jordan

That it would write in zero gravity just as well as the high tech Zero Gravity Pen the yanks spent a fortune on developing.
That one still makes me laugh.

Phil

Faberge egg

I had to google this zero gravity pen, and found more then meets the eye....

Space Pen - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

NASA programs previously used pencils (for example a 1965 order of mechanical pencils[2]) but because of the substantial dangers that broken-off pencil tips and graphite dust pose in zero gravity to electronics and the flammable nature of the wood present in pencils[2] a better solution was needed. NASA never approached Paul Fisher to develop a pen, nor did Fisher receive any government funding for the pen's development. Fisher invented it independently, and then asked NASA to try it. After the introduction of the AG7 Space Pen, both the American and Soviet (later Russian) space agencies adopted it.

Swan Lake.

I have a Russian tool and cutter grinder copy of a cincinnati no2 (or maybe the other way round how knows) built like a brick dunny and works very well
also got some micrometers as good as or better than my mitutoyos

I like the space race stuff the yanks spent billions putting a man on the moon just for the sake of putting a man on the moon
the Russians said what can we find out about space and the moon launched many more rockets had in 1970 unmaned rovers driving around on the moon for over 300 days taking pictures and collecting other data and made some amazing discoverys at very little cost compared to the yanks
Lunokhod programme - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
and the pen pencil thing is defiantly balony

cheers
Harty

Read 'August 1914' and appreciate the Russian way....(Solzhenitsyn)(bit depressing, though, like most war novels)

Russian number 4 equivalent iron hand plane.
A quick review here:
The Village Woodworker: From Russia With Love

Cheers
SG