The history of the creation of an excavator. Steam engines in the construction of roads and canals

Without them, these construction projects would drag on for decades, and it is far from certain that there would be enough labor for them. The history of Stalin's industrialization began in 1882, in the town of Bucyrus, Ohio, where a rail-mounted steam shovel called Thompson's Iron Steam Shovel was put into mass production at the local Bucyrus Foundry & Manufacturing Company plant. This unit became the prototype for the first and only Russian pre-revolutionary steam excavator "Putilovets", production of which began in 1903 at the Putilov Machine-Building Plant.
Unlike modern excavators that operate on hydraulics, the Bucyrus had all its working mechanisms driven by chain winches. The bucket volume was 1.4 cubic yards, and the excavator crew consisted of four people: a driver, also known as the “crew commander,” a fireman, an oiler, and a bucket operator. In addition, each excavator was assigned a team of seven people who manually laid the rails in front of it. The weight of the vehicle was 75 tons. A little later, a more powerful 85-ton modification with a two-cubic-yard bucket appeared. At the time of its creation, the Thompson excavator was considered the most productive in the world. In one day he could remove and move up to 4,000 cubic meters of soil into trolleys. For comparison, the daily production rate per digger was, depending on the complexity of the soil, from 2.5 to 4 cubic meters. Thus, one steam shovel replaced up to a thousand ordinary ones. At the same time, it was relatively simple to produce and could be produced at any locomotive plant.
It is not surprising that when in Russia, due to the large scale of railway construction, the need for excavators arose, the Busyrus machine was taken as a model, although by 1903 it was no longer considered new. From 1903 to 1917, 37 Putilov tanks were built in St. Petersburg, which worked throughout the country, from Eastern Siberia to the Kola Peninsula.
In 1929, the industrialization program required the resumption of excavator production. They decided not to bother with the development of a new machine, but simply shook off the dust from the Putilovets drawings and transferred them to the Kovrov Mechanical Plant, which was to become the flagship of the Soviet excavator industry. There, the development of the production of earthmoving machines at first went neither shaky nor slow. The first prototype was made only in the spring of 1931, the second was assembled a few months later. Of course, the bosses were not pleased with this pace of work, and they decided to sharply speed up the work, transferring the plant to the jurisdiction of the OGPU. I don’t know (although I can guess) what methods the security officers used, but under their strict leadership the enterprise immediately started working at machine-gun speed, producing as many as 177 excavators in 1932-34. That is, in three years they made almost five times more than the pre-revolutionary Putilov plant produced in 14 years! Due to a change in the place of production, the name of the machine was changed from “Putilovets” to “Kovrovets”. “Kovrovtsy” were used at many construction sites, but most of them were sent to the construction of the Moscow-Volga canal, where the appearance of these powerful units made it possible to sharply intensify land work. For example, at the so-called Deep excavation in the Khimki region, tens of thousands of diggers removed two million cubic meters of soil in the first two years, and over the next two years, 32 excavators removed eight million cubic meters from the bed of the future canal, digging a giant trench 24 meters deep and 140 meters wide. meters and a length of six kilometers. We can say with confidence that without “steam shovels” this and many other construction projects would not have been completed before the war.
The most amazing thing is that some copies of the Kovrovtsy worked until the end of the 1980s. Unfortunately, not a single one of them has survived to this day; in the “troubled times” of the 90s, all these epoch-making machines were dismantled for scrap metal.

The race in technical weapons for civilian use between the Soviet Union and other countries in the middle of the last century was not yet pronounced. Basically, the world developed the military industry by inertia after the Second World War. In the civil sector, engineers were in no particular hurry to develop. However, even before this time, the same excavators in the domestic industry were not as popular as they are now. For a simple, but wild reason for today's times: most excavation work was done manually using ordinary shovels. They even built railroads using hand tools. In 1843, Tsar-Father Nicholas I decided to benefit the builders and purchased four rail-mounted steam excavators from America. But the working class did not accept the improvement and five years later handed over the machines to the construction of the West Siberian railway. There, the builders’ hands just stopped working and the excavators came in handy. And in 1854, Russian craftsmen created a mechanism driven by a steam engine for scooping up earth from faces on one of the mountains near Nizhny Tagil.

In 1843, Nicholas I bought steam excavators from the USA

1900–1940s

In the image and likeness of American excavators in Russia, the first single-bucket “shrews” began to be produced in 1902 at the Tver Excavator (at that time Putilov) plant. The model was called “Putilovets”. New products of tsarist heavy engineering were used to lay railway tracks. By 1917, which changed the entire course of history in the country, the company produced only 35 vehicles with replaceable buckets (2.3 m 3 for heavy loads and 1.5 m 3 for light loads). At the same time, foreign equipment was also purchased.

Putilov workers went to the construction of railways

Then the production of earthmoving machines practically stopped. For almost 10 years, a fleet of old American excavators was restored in the USSR. This was done by the Zemmashin Bureau at the Supreme Economic Council. And only in 1930 the Council of Ministers gave instructions to organize its own production. The design and technical office for excavator construction has begun work. In April 1931, in the workshops of the NKPS repair plant in the city of Kovrov, where previously only rail-mounted excavators were repaired, they built their own version of the 85-ton “Putilov” machine with a bucket. Despite the shortcomings, the first-born went to modernize the railway in the area of ​​​​the city of Gorky.

“Kovrovets” was assembled in the image of “Putilovets”

Meanwhile, at the plant they began to eliminate errors, and in October they presented the second copy of Kovrovets. Over two years, workers produced 177 excavators from the workshops. To operate the machine, two teams were required at once. At the same time, foreign-made earth-moving equipment still prevailed in the Union. By 1935, 1,100 excavators were used on construction sites. And most of them were “tied” to the railway.

The first domestic full-rotary model with tracked propulsion was MIIIP-1.5, assembled at the Votkinsk Machine-Building Plant in 1932. In addition to the tracks, it had another important difference from other Soviet “competitors” - the boom worked with several types of working equipment: a straight shovel, a dragline, a crane and a grab. And “Votkinets” had three steam engines. The chief was responsible for the movement of the machine itself and the operation of the winches. Rotary and pressure - for the operation of the bucket.

PPG-1.5 was actively used in the Gulag. Photo: A. Dimitrov

In 1934, the Kovrov plant developed the PPG-1.5 crawler excavator with two main steam engines and a 15-meter boom, which immediately became the main working machine in the construction of the Gulag and other places under the patronage of the NKVD. The fact is that the enterprise came under the control of the security officers for two years, and they took advantage of the situation. With such leadership, the plant workers managed to exceed the already overwhelming plan. The excavator worked with three types of equipment: a straight shovel, a dragline and a crane.

"Komsomolets" became the first mass-produced excavator with an internal combustion engine

Around the same time, the Moscow enterprise Mashinostroitel decided to “crossbreed” a tractor from the Stalin Tractor Plant and its own earth-moving mechanism. The model, called “Komsomolets”, became the first mass-produced excavator with an internal combustion engine (power 32 hp). The small volume of the bucket - only 0.35 m 3 - made it possible to use the machine in various sectors of the national economy. And after modernization, which consisted in the use of a pressure mechanism, the model received the MI-DV-0.35 index and recognition from the army.

In "Lazar Kaganovich" or LK-0.5, internal combustion engines from tractors were installed

In 1936, engineers of the Kovrov plant built the Lazar Kaganovich tracked excavator with a bucket with a volume of 0.5 m 3, abbreviated as LK-0.5. It was equipped with a diesel engine from the ChTZ-S60 tractor, hidden in a metal body, mounted on tracks with 4 road wheels. The model was equipped with 7 types of working equipment. And by 1940, an updated version of the LK-0.5-A appeared. The number of types of working equipment was reduced to four, the number of road wheels increased to five, and the engine was replaced with a 65-horsepower one.

The first Soviet mining excavator M-IV-E

In the same year, the era of USSR mining excavators began. The Ural Heavy Engineering Plant presented the M-IV-E model. Electric motors were responsible for its operation, which drove both the machine itself and the boom with the only working equipment - a bucket with a capacity of 3 m 3. However, it was possible to install an extended boom, but the bucket on it was already smaller - 2 m 3.

At the end of the 1930s, the Mashinostroitel plant began producing a new model PG-0.35. The rotating platform is mounted on tracked propulsors, and a 52 hp kerosene engine was used as the power plant. With.

Another development was released at the enterprise using an engine from ChTZ S-60. In the full-rotary tracked model PDG-0.57, as in PG-0.35, the main transmission shaft was used to control the excavator. It was connected to a reversing mechanism, which is responsible for turning the platform.

The segment of mobile excavators began at the Leningrad Machine-Building Plant NKPS, where an earth-moving rig was installed on the chassis of a YAG-6 truck. The design received an index of YES-0.25. The last figure traditionally for that time indicated the volume of the bucket. The excavator mechanisms were driven by a separate 40-horsepower gasoline engine. As our colleagues from TechStory.ru note, “the main transmission shaft transmits movement to a reversing mechanism that has internal belt clutches. The front shaft of the winch is designed for the traction or pressure drum, the rear shaft for the lifting drum. The boom lift winch is mounted on the shaft of the lifting drum and is driven through a worm gear from the upper running gear. All rotating shafts are equipped with ball and roller bearings.”

The D-0.25 model produced by the Kungur plant had a similar design. Only the excavator was placed not on a truck chassis, but on multi-support frame tracks.

At the same time, the same enterprise produced the TR-0.25 model. Mechanisms for digging soil were placed on the base of the ChTZ S-60 tractor. To prevent the load in the boom bucket from overturning the machine, a counterweight was installed on the front of the tractor.

SE-3 had a large power reserve

After the Second World War, the country gradually began to resume production of excavators. At Uralmash they remembered the drawings prepared back in 1940. Then engineers improved the M-IV-E model, but did not have time to put it into production. And in 1947, after regular modernizations taking into account the latest technical advances at that time, the SE-3 left the workshop. And although the standard bucket volume was 3 m 3, in Soviet quarries the machines were operated even with five-cubic-meter buckets - the safety margin was so powerful.

In 1945, the Kovrov plant developed a diesel excavator D-107 with a bucket with a capacity of 0.5 m 3. True, the model began to be mass produced only two years later. After some time, new modifications appeared - with an 80 hp diesel engine. With. and an electric motor with a power of 40 hp. s., receiving the indexes E-505 and E-504, respectively. The performance of the model for that time was very good, up to 100 m 3 per hour.

In 1947, production began of the modernized ET-351 excavator-ditcher for digging trenches up to 3.5 m deep.

1950s

In 1950, the first mass-produced pneumatic wheeled excavator appeared in the Country of Soviets - the E-255 with a bucket with a volume of 0.25 m 3. The control was lever-hydraulic. The model was immediately accepted into service in the Soviet army. True, later the 255th ceased to suit the servicemen. Even despite the increase in bucket volume to 0.35 m 3 (with a change in index to E-353). The reason was the shallow digging depth - up to 2.6 m.

E-255 was used for both construction and military purposes

1952 was a very significant year for Soviet excavator construction. Employees of the cranes and excavators department of the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Construction and Road Engineering created the first shovel with a hydraulic drive. True, so far only on paper. The base chassis was to use an all-wheel drive GAZ-63 with a frame shortened by half a meter. The project was called E-151, which was deciphered quite simply: an excavator with a 0.15 m 3 bucket of the first model. The shovel could be either straight or reverse. The height and depth of digging reached 2 m. But despite the promising hydraulics, in comparison with other excavators, this model was inferior in all respects, so the prototype for the national economy was never built. But the main military construction department of the USSR Ministry of Defense became interested in the new product, and in 1953 the first E-151 was released. During the tests, it turned out that the machine was poorly adapted to real working conditions, in particular, when digging hard soils, it simply tipped over. Therefore, engineers hastily began modifications.

E-151 often capsized during testing

In 1953, engineers at the Kovrov plant modernized their now popular models. In particular, instead of a dependent pressure mechanism, a combined one was installed, and the caterpillar track was also widened. New versions were put into production under the designations E-505A and E-504A.

In 1955, the E-505A was equipped with a more capacious bucket - 0.65 m 3 - and put into mass production under the symbol E-651. At the same time, the designers turned their attention to the undeservedly forgotten E-505 and, having equipped it with pneumatics, launched production under the symbol E-506.

In 1956, two factories at once - in Saransk and in Kyiv - began producing a modified version of the E-151. Instead of a short truck, they decided to use MTZ-L5 and M5 tractors. To install earth-moving equipment, the tracks on the chassis were increased.

In 1957, engineers finally finalized the E-353 model and launched it into mass production under the designation E-302. Engine 37 hp. With. placed along the body, the control was made pneumatic. The bucket volume was 0.3 m 3, the boom reach reached 5 m. An important advantage was the plug-in front-wheel drive, which made the excavator almost an all-terrain vehicle.

The E-305 on the YaAZ-214 truck chassis has been used by the military for a long time

Two years later, the 302nd platform was installed on the chassis of a YaAZ-214 truck, which delighted the military. True, the control was already pneumomechanical, unlike the ancestral model. The new mobile earthmoving model went into production under the symbol E-305.

Around the same time, the E-303 crawler-mounted excavator with a 0.3 m 3 bucket with pneumatic lever control appeared. It, like the long-stroke version E-304, was unified with the 302nd model. But if the 303 and 302 could work with forward and reverse shovels, then the E-304 was equipped only with a reverse shovel.

p.s.

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An excavator is the main type of earth-moving machine equipped with a bucket. Its main purpose is the development of soils (rocks, minerals) and loading of bulk materials from stacks.

Of course, excavators, like many old analogues of equipment, were used in Ancient Egypt and Ancient Rome. Then they were used to deepen river beds and canals. However, the documented history of the emergence of earthmoving machines begins in the 16th century, when Leonardo da Vinci proposed the first designs for excavators - draglines. Thus, a sketch of a drawing of a grab for an excavator dates back to 1500. A few years later, the scientist supervised the construction of canals in the arid Milan Valley, where he used a dredger of his own design.

In 1718, the French mechanics de la Balme and Belidor presented a design for an earth-moving device with two buckets. The mechanism operated in the ports of Toulon and Brest. And in 1773, a book was published in the USA with a drawing of the first wooden wheeled scraper, which was moved by a horse. The scraper was built and worked on road construction.

In 1832-1836, America was actively constructing a gigantic railroad network, which caused a shortage of human labor. Then the American engineer Elisha Grave Otis, better known to us as the inventor of the safe elevator, developed the first steam-powered single-bucket excavator. It was semi-rotary, had a railway chassis, was equipped with a 1.14 m3 bucket, a 15 hp steam engine, provided an average productivity of 45-50 m3/hour and replaced approximately 50 construction workers. Initially, Otis excavators were used primarily in railroad construction, where within a few years they were replacing more than 200 workers.

In 1847, the Russian mechanic Kushelevsky proposed the idea of ​​an earth-moving machine that could work both on water and on land. This excavator was supposed to combine all the advantages of a river dredge and a land excavator.

At the beginning of the 20th century, with the development of the electrical power industry, the design of excavators also developed rapidly. In 1905, the German company Orenstein & Koppel produced the first steam-powered full-rotary machines, that is, excavators with a rotating cabin. The buckets of these machines could hold up to 4 cubic meters of earth.

In 1910, the American company Busyrus released a full-circle crawler excavator. In the same year, the first electric excavators appeared. Beginning in 1912, the first copy with an internal combustion engine on caterpillar tracks began to operate. And four years later, diesel engines began to be installed in excavators.

Nowadays, excavators are classified by chassis type, drive type, type of working equipment, and the ability to rotate the working equipment relative to the supporting surface. They are capable of working in virtually any conditions and on any surface with incredible lifting capacity.

Modern bucket excavators have gone far ahead on the technical side, although undoubtedly without the engineering thought of past centuries it is unknown what equipment would be used now.

Excavators are earth-moving machines designed to dig and move soil. All excavators, depending on the use of working time for actually digging the soil, are divided into two large groups: continuous action - multi-bucket and periodic (cyclic) action - single-bucket.

They were used in Ancient Egypt and Ancient Rome as a means of mechanizing work on deepening river beds and canals.

The documented history of earthmoving equipment, in particular excavators, can begin to be written from the beginning of the 15th century, when in the Venetian edition of the Codex Giovanni Fontana of 1420 a story was published about a bucket dredge used to deepen the bottom of canals and expand sea harbors.

But officially the idea of ​​​​creating earth-moving machines belongs to Leonardo da Vinci, who at the beginning of the 16th century. proposed designs for dragline excavators. A sketch of a drawing of a grab for an excavator dates back to 1500. A few years later, Leonardo supervised the construction of canals in the arid Milan Valley. For excavation work, he used a dredger of his own design.

In the scientist’s notebooks, along with drawings of the aircraft, there are sketches of a dredge with a dragline bucket, as well as a structure reminiscent of an excavator. The dragline, proposed by Leonardo da Vinci, is basically reminiscent of the bucket of a modern excavator. Here is its description: “The ladle, pointed like a ploughshare, in front and behind, has a sieve. This will scoop up a lot of soil and allow water to drain. The bucket will be suspended on ropes that are wound around a winch located on the pontoon. The bottom of the bucket can also be hinged, making it easier to unload.” Nowadays, however, dragline buckets with a hinged bottom are not produced, but this principle is successfully used in buckets for straight shovels.

In 1597, a floating dredge was designed and built to clear canals in Venice. Its author was the Venetian mechanic Buanaiuto Lorini, who described the structure of the machine in the work “Delle Fortificazione”. Then, in 1718, a project for an earth-moving device with two buckets was presented to the French Academy of Sciences by mechanics de la Balme and Belidor. The mechanism operated in the ports of Toulon and Brest.

Then in 1795, the famous American inventor who created the first practically usable one, Robert Fulton, also designed the first four-wheeled grader-elevator. However, the machine was tested only 70 years later on road construction in America. But in 1796, during dredging work in the English port of Sunderland, a bucket dredge driven by a steam engine was used. It was built with the participation of inventor James Watt. In one working stroke, the buckets retrieved up to one and a half tons of soil from the bottom of the harbor, which was approximately 4 times higher than the productivity of a hand dredge.

The French made a great contribution to the development of excavator technology: in 1860, engineer M. Couvre created a land chain bucket excavator with a 15 horsepower engine. It was tested on the construction of the Sedan-Thionville road, and later worked on the construction of the Suez Canal. And already in 1862, the first steam roller with both driving axles appeared on the streets of Paris. The inventor of the machine was the mechanic Baleison. However, steam rollers did not become widespread. Indeed, to maintain the required pressure in its boiler, it was necessary to burn 60-80 kilograms of fuel per hour.

Russian inventors proposed many interesting devices that helped ease hard work in the construction of canals, roads, bridges and other structures. So, at the end of the 20s of the 19th century, the Rzhev tradesman Nemilov appeared in St. Petersburg. He had already built many mills, dams and bridges, using ingenious machines of his own design and manufacture. So now he submitted the drawings to General Betancourt for conclusion: “Machines for leveling the land at the foot of the river”, “Machines for lining the soles between pillars with granite stone slabs” and “Copra of a special design, which have not yet been seen anywhere.” Three times Nemilov had to renew his passport in the capital, he never received an answer and returned home with nothing. But these projects, if they had been approved and accepted, could have played a significant role in the development of construction machines.

In those same years, in St. Petersburg, in the attic of one of the houses on Gorokhovaya Street near the Kamenny Bridge, lived the “passionate mechanic” Kazamanov. Having no funds, no materials, no tools, he still managed to build models of his inventions, among which were a kind of pile driver for driving piles, and a machine “for lifting heavy objects with greater ease and convenience to a hill.” The technical innovations created by these and other unknown self-taught inventors found neither proper understanding nor proper distribution.

Maybe Russian dredgers were a little more lucky. The first floating dredge was created at the St. Petersburg Institute of Railways in 1809. Its power was 15 horsepower. Such a device could replace the work of many people. This machine was intended for cleaning water bodies. In 1811-1812, the dredger was built at the Izhora plant. From 1813 to 1819, the machine worked to clean up the Kronstadt port.

Later, improved designs of dredgers were proposed in Russia and abroad. But it was, perhaps, one of the first multi-bucket excavators.

In 1847, the Russian inventor Kushelevsky took another step in this area. He proposed the idea of ​​a dredging machine that could work both on water and on land. This machine combined the advantages of a river dredge and a land excavator.

In 1854, materials prepared by a commission studying the natural resources and economy of the Perm province were published in St. Petersburg. They published interesting information about the first Russian steam excavator, which the authors of the document called the “earthen mechanism.” The commission members were unable to determine who built it. It was only known that this unknown mechanic was from Nizhny Tagil, but the described machine essentially did what an excavator does: it could move and “through special devices,” the description of the machine said, it dug ore and removed it from face, preparing the work front for further ore extraction. Thus, almost 130 years ago in Russia, in the Vysokaya Mountain mine in the Urals, a method of open-pit mining using an excavator was used.

At the beginning of the 20th century, with the development of the electric power industry, excavator designs also developed by leaps and bounds. In 1905, the first steam full-rotary (with a rotating cabin) excavators were produced by the German company Orenstein & Koppel. The buckets of these machines could hold up to 4 cubic meters of earth. In 1910, the first electric excavators appeared, and the American company Busyrus released a fully rotating crawler excavator. Beginning in 1912, the first crawler-mounted excavator with an internal combustion engine began operating.

The production of single-bucket excavators in Russia began in 1901 at the Putilov (now Tver Excavator) Plant.

The active construction of railways in the USA in the thirties of the nineteenth century and the shortage of construction workers led to the creation in 1832-1836 by the American Otis of the first steam single-bucket excavator (Fig. 1).

The excavator was semi-rotary, had a railway chassis, was equipped with a 1.14 cubic meter bucket, a 15 hp steam engine, provided an average productivity of 45-50 cubic meters per hour and replaced approximately 50 workers. Within a few years, Otis excavators were replacing 180 workers. Initially, excavators were used primarily in railroad construction. One of the first excavators was sold to England in 1842, and in 1843, four of the seven excavators built by Otis were sold to Russia for use in the construction of the Nikolaevskaya road. However, construction contractors did not accept these American machines and sold them to the Urals in 1848.

In Nizhny Tagil, excavators, for the first time in world practice, were used for stripping operations during ore mining.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, large-scale construction of railways and canals required the movement of ever larger masses of earth, which could no longer be accomplished with the manual labor of diggers. This led to the active development of a variety of earth-moving machines.

In Germany, “construction locomobiles” (Fig. 2) equipped with single-rope grabs were used.

Until the end of the century, the bulk of earthworks in the construction of railways in Russia were carried out manually (shovels, wheelbarrows, rakes), since cheap labor existed in abundance. When labor difficulties arose during the construction of the West Siberian section of the Trans-Siberian Railway, “excavating machines” were purchased from America. Such cars were harnessed to 12-16 horses. To excavate and move soil, horse-drawn drags with a metal bucket, called “skrippels” or “shrews,” were also used.

The first Russian single-bucket semi-rotary railway excavator with a replaceable bucket (2.3 cubic meters for light loads and 1.5 cubic meters for heavy loads) was built at the Putilov plant in 1902. Its productivity was 100-290 cubic meters per hour, weight 65-75 tons. Before 1917, 35 such machines were built. At the beginning of the 20th century, excavators were used quite intensively in Russia. For example, during the construction of a dry dock in Kronstadt in 1909-1910, work was carried out in two shifts of 10 hours each. Machines of this type (Fig. 3) were manufactured until the 30s of the 20th century.

In some cases, floating excavators were used. Floating excavators were, as a rule, semi-rotary with a straight shovel. In the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the construction of giant canals began, which required moving huge masses of soil. The Suez Canal (length 160 km, construction began in 1859) was built over about 10 years (mostly by hand). The total number of workers involved in the construction reached 40 thousand people. During construction, approximately 75 million cubic meters of soil were moved.

During the construction of the Panama Canal (1880-1913), 160 million cubic meters of soil were moved. At the second stage of construction (1903-1913), more than a hundred single-bucket (mostly railway) and about 20 multi-bucket excavators were used.

After the First World War, simultaneously with the general development of technology, the development of excavators intensified. Internal combustion engines and electric drives, the use of caterpillar (and walking) drives have made it possible to significantly increase the power and mobility of excavators. Excavators have become full-rotary, the range of their working equipment has increased (forward and backhoe, dragline, plow, etc.) and the scope of their application (overburden, tunneling, etc.). Single-bucket excavators were improved in the USA and Russia. In Germany, they began to build more and more powerful multi-bucket excavators. Numerous special machines (ditch diggers, etc.) appeared.

In the USSR, the production of excavators was organized in 1931. The first 15 machines were produced. Since 1947, the Ural Heavy Engineering Plant (UZTM) was the first in the world to organize the serial production of mining excavators with buckets with a capacity of 3-5 m3. In 1958, UZTM produced a walking dragline excavator with a 25 m3 bucket and a 100 m boom, and in 1965, at the Novokramatorsk Machine-Building Plant (NKMZ), an excavator-shovel with a 35 m3 bucket for hard soils was manufactured. In 1975, UZTM completed the production of a walking dragline with a bucket with a capacity of 100 m3 and a boom of 100 m. UZTM mastered the most powerful quarry shovel, with a 20 m3 bucket, for hard soils (1976).

Already in the early 50s of the 20th century, giant excavators with buckets with a volume of up to 30 cubic meters were used. (EGL-15 of the Novo-Kramatorsk plant, American excavators Marion, Busyrus, etc.).

In the second half of the 20th century, traditional types of excavators were improved mainly through the use of new machine-building technologies and equipment (hydraulic drive, etc.).

Manual labor in earthworks has been preserved only in cases where there is an excess of free labor or when the volume of work is small and the cramped conditions do not allow the use of the necessary earthmoving equipment.

Modern excavators, bulldozers and other earth-moving machines move along the ground on wheels or tracks; they can “walk” on rails or with the help of special supports; there are also floating dredgers. However, caterpillar tracks have become perhaps the most common method of moving heavy vehicles. Machines with this speed can reliably move over uneven surfaces, working on a construction site, in a pit or in a quarry, extracting minerals. The problem of reliable movement of earth-moving machines has always occupied their creators.

At the beginning of the last century, various countries tried to replace the wheel drive with some other one. In Russia in 1879, the Russian peasant Fyodor Blinov received, as they then said, the privilege of a “Wagon with endless rails for transporting goods along country roads.” By that time, railways had already been built, the rails were already known. And the inventor came up with the idea of ​​using closed rails running over rollers as a running device. A study of the drawings and descriptions of this invention showed that Blinov’s “car” is nothing more than a caterpillar tractor. Such machines began to be built abroad only in the 20th century.

The development of tracked tractors made it possible already at the beginning of the 20th century to use them as a basis for earth-moving machines, which became widely used in the construction of roads, waterways, and in the mining industry.

The first crawler excavators bore little resemblance to modern machines. At the beginning of the century, they were made half of wooden parts. The boom was made of wood, and the tracks were made of wooden plates (tracks). The tracks, however, were first covered with metal sheets, and later the tracks became completely metal. Such an excavator was used in the USA in 1912 on the construction of the Calumetseg canal.

Today, a number of foreign and Russian factories are engaged in the production and release of this specialized equipment, supplying technologically advanced, functional machines to the world market. There are single-bucket excavators (dragline, mechanical shovel and others) and multi-bucket excavators (chain and rotary). The characteristics of the devices (power, bucket volume, etc.) can be different and are selected individually depending on the type and complexity of the work for which they are intended. There is also a choice of additional attachments.

If you ask the question: “without what would the great construction projects of the first five-year plans have been impossible?”, then some will probably say - “without the Gulag”, others - “without the revolutionary enthusiasm of the working masses”, others - “without the iron will of the party leadership”, but in fact In fact, they would have been physically impossible (at least in a comparable time frame) without steam excavators, which made it possible to speed up the pace of excavation work tens of times. Without them, these construction projects would drag on for decades, and it is far from certain that there would be enough labor for them.

That's what we'll talk about excavators. The history of Stalin's industrialization began in 1882, in the town of Bucyrus, Ohio, where a rail-mounted steam shovel called Thompson's Iron Steam Shovel was put into mass production at the local Bucyrus Foundry & Manufacturing Company plant. This unit became the prototype for the first and only Russian pre-revolutionary steam excavator "Putilovets", production of which began in 1903 at the Putilov Machine-Building Plant.

Thompson's machine was a vibrant embodiment of steampunk technology. It was mounted on a long four-axle railway platform and resembled a boxcar. A horizontal locomotive-type boiler powered three single-cylinder steam engines with a total power of 150 hp. One ensured the movement of the excavator, the other ensured the horizontal rotation of the boom, and the third provided the movement of the bucket. The boiler ran on wood or coal. The cabin was lit by kerosene lamps.

Unlike modern excavators that operate on hydraulics, the Bucyrus had all its working mechanisms driven by chain winches. The bucket volume was 1.4 cubic yards, and the excavator crew consisted of four people: a driver, also known as the “crew commander,” a fireman, an oiler, and a bucket operator. In addition, each excavator was assigned a team of seven people who manually laid the rails in front of it. The weight of the vehicle was 75 tons. A little later, a more powerful 85-ton modification with a two-cubic-yard bucket appeared.

At the time of its creation, the Thompson excavator was considered the most productive in the world. In one day he could remove and move up to 4,000 cubic meters of soil into trolleys. For comparison, the daily production rate per digger was, depending on the complexity of the soil, from 2.5 to 4 cubic meters. Thus, one steam shovel replaced up to a thousand ordinary ones. At the same time, it was relatively simple to produce and could be produced at any locomotive plant.

It is not surprising that when in Russia, due to the large scale of railway construction, the need for excavators arose, the Busyrus machine was taken as a model, although by 1903 it was no longer considered new. From 1903 to 1917, 37 Putilov tanks were built in St. Petersburg, which worked throughout the country, from Eastern Siberia to the Kola Peninsula.

In 1929, the industrialization program required the resumption of excavator production. They decided not to bother with the development of a new machine, but simply shook off the dust from the Putilovets drawings and transferred them to the Kovrov Mechanical Plant, which was to become the flagship of the Soviet excavator industry. There, the development of the production of earth-moving machines at first proceeded neither shaky nor slow. The first prototype was made only in the spring of 1931, the second was assembled a few months later.

Of course, the bosses were not pleased with this pace of work, and they decided to sharply speed up the work, transferring the plant to the jurisdiction of the OGPU. I don’t know (although I can guess) what methods the security officers used, but under their strict leadership the enterprise immediately started working at machine-gun speed, producing as many as 177 excavators in 1932-34. That is, in three years they made almost five times more than the pre-revolutionary Putilov plant produced in 14 years! Due to a change in the place of production, the name of the machine was changed from “Putilovets” to “Kovrovets”.

“Kovrovtsy” were used at many construction sites, but most of them were sent to the construction of the Moscow-Volga canal, where the appearance of these powerful units made it possible to sharply intensify land work. For example, at the so-called Deep excavation in the Khimki region, tens of thousands of diggers removed two million cubic meters of soil in the first two years, and over the next two years, 32 excavators removed eight million cubic meters from the bed of the future canal, digging a giant trench 24 meters deep and 140 meters wide. and six kilometers long. We can say with confidence that without “steam shovels” this, and many other construction projects, would not have been completed before the war.

The most amazing thing is that some copies of the Kovrovtsy worked until the end of the 1980s. Unfortunately, not a single one of them has survived to this day; in the “troubled times” of the 90s, all these epoch-making machines were dismantled for scrap metal.

Drawing of a Thompson excavator produced by Bucyrus

Thompson's "Steam Shovel" on the Panama Canal. 119 excavators were involved in the construction of this large-scale hydraulic structure, 77 of which were from Buscyrus.

Another excavator of the same brand. Thanks to the removed side, the cylinder of the steam engine that powered the boom rotation mechanism is clearly visible.

Thompson excavator in a sand pit somewhere in the USA. The name of the manufacturer is written on the board.

"Putilovets" is a Russian copy of "Bucyrus".

"Putilovets" at the construction of the Siberian (Amur) railway in 1912 or 1913. Pay attention to the man with an ax on the back platform, chopping wood for the firebox.

At first, excavation work on the Moscow-Volga canal was carried out like this. Productivity was somewhere on the level of Ancient Egypt.

Then “Kovrovtsy” appeared and things became more fun.

The first prototype of the machine was also sent to build the canal. Note the abbreviation NKVD on the side of the cabin. The photo was taken in 1934 in the Deep Recess area.

Assembly of "Kovrovets" or "Putilovets", sent for the construction of the Saratov Agricultural Machinery Plant.