TL;DR Best drinking glasses ever made, practically unbreakable compared to regular drinking glasses, no longer produced because no commercial company is interested in a product so good it hurts future sales.
I remember dad getting a Mosin back in the late '80s. It came wrapped in brown paper and was basically a block of cosmoline. He put it in a cardboard box by the wood stove and let it melt for weeks.
I got my first Mosin for Christmas from my dad in 2008. We went to the gun store and I picked out the one I wanted it and i picked out a numbers matching 1944 M44 Izzy. He got me it and one of the original lead sealed spam cans of ammo and I’m pretty sure the spam can of ammo cost more than the rifle did lol. I spent almost all day Christmas Day cleaning the cosmoline out and off that thing the hard way and still didn’t get it all. When I bout my second one a 1929 Tula hex receiver I had learned my lesson and disassembled it and set the pieces on a tray next to the heat register with 2 space heaters blowing on it for a couple days.
Ugh, God I forgot about the fucking cosmoline. Scrubbing the absolute shit out of a Mosin with kerosene and then having to BAKE the rest of it out of the goddamn stock was awful.
My dad has a Lada that was imported to the US by a collector. It has a ton of new old stock parts that say “Made in USSR”, like on the oil filter even.
It had its quirks. The heater worked great, but only for the front seats. The rear was freezing. It would start immediately with the choke on at 40 below. It would do 100 km/h max, the cruise control was just put it in fourth and jam your foot on the floor. But it never let me down.
If I ever needed parts, they were plentiful because like a VW Beetle it was the same car from like 1966 to 1985, so the scrap yards were full of cheap parts. In 1992 when the USSR fell the Russians came over the border into Finland and bought every single one, because there was no tax on used cars.
I drove a Lada down a Comms access track in half a meter of snow. It was so steep that at the top, you couldn't see the bottom and when i went over the edge my nose was almost pressed against the glass. I fleetingly thought "if the front digs in it will flip end for end" it didnt, it crawled, growled, whined, n sledged its way to the bottom largely intact. I was amazed, n it wasn't my car
And you can replace ural air filter with fishing line. Just remember to add a hook, that it is factory standard. (you can take the line and hook to go fishing if bike breaks
Getting Ural parts was a challenge dealing with Russian post office, then I found a source in Spain and a few other places I could get stuff domestically. Solid bikes, even if under powered and heavy.
A Lada? Your father must be well connected! We waited 10 years for Zaporozhets!
Context: When those cars were new you had to order them through a waiting list which usually took 10-15 years. You couldn’t choose a car but well placed people with the ruling class could persuade the list to give them a Lada or a Volga. For a Volga you basically had to be a politician or high ranking military officer. A Lada was given to mid or low level bureaucrats. The common people got Moskvich, Zaporozhets or Trabant depending on the family size. If you had foreign contacts buying an Opel or a Ford was easier but it costed as much as a house so usually only oligarchs would buy foreign cars.
That’s why people from the Eastern Bloc hate those cars with a passion. They were literal symbols of oppression and your place on the caste hierarchy. My family was barred from owning a car since my great grandmother was a nurse in Nazi Germany. My grandfather had to work 5 years in Libya and buy a Ford from there or we would have to roll around on bicycles for the rest of our lives.
Very interesting. My dad has no Eastern European heritage but he collects fiats and has the lada for its relation to the fiat 124. It popped up for sale by chance and he got it. We know a bit about their history but not their full context.
Out of curiosity at what point in time did they become more common place for regular people? Cuz I know now they are considered cheap beaters over there. Obviously I know it’s decades later now though.
The one related to Fiat 124 wasn’t actually called Lada initially. Domestically we called them Zhiguli) and they were sold under the Lada brand outside the union.
Zhiguli/VAZ-2101 became common among regular people in the 80s so around 10 years after it was officially released. Maybe it was more common in Russia but around the satellites like my country Bulgarian we mostly got Moskvitch 408 which was designed in the 60s. We had it since we had local production of it. It was a really crappy car, very heavy yet quite small on the inside and the thing had as much power as a lawnmower. It had 50bhp on paper with a curb weight of 1000kg. In reality it had maybe 40bhp if you got lucky and it wasn’t built by a drunk mechanic. Later on we got the upgraded Moskvitch 412. Which was better but still basically a toy when compared to the Ladas. You will notice something about the Moskvitch especially if you’re an American, those cars were a total design ripoff of the Buicks and Cadillacs of the time. Almost all Soviet cars were rip offs of American or European cars. Even the Zhiguli as you said was basically a Fiat with smaller engine and worse build quality.
Funny thing about the Zhiguli. The deal with the Italians was that they would give us the design and the patent for the car and in exchange the Soviets would supply Fiat with steel. The problem was that Soviet steel was the worse steel you could buy. Fiat realised that when the shipments started to arrive and the steel was rusted out of the box. They scrapped the deal but the Soviets had the designs already so they started producing Zhiguli. If you have Fiat 124 however you will notice that it has better engine, better parts and better build quality. The Zhiguli was the original Fiat from Wish.com sort of thing.
The best thing about Soviet cars is that they are so simple that they are perfect as a learning car for a beginner mechanic. They had to be simple as we didn’t had professional mechanics in the union. You either fix your own car or you are walking today. That’s why you would find amazing modifications on those cars - everything from the obligatory structural duct tape to fitting a smuggled BMW engine on a Lada 🤣
I disagree. In my opinion moskvich was much better than lada of the time. Yes , it was not a race car but it was very reliable and could take a beating. If something went wrong one could fix almost anything with basic tools on the side of the road. Ladas weren't too bad either but they were less suited for bad roads and had rust problems. I don't know about how it was in Bulgaria, but in ex USSR countries nobody hated that cars and generally people have fond memories associated with them. Again, they weren't much in comparison with American or European contemporary makes, but they were good enough for their place and time.
Maybe it was because we hadn’t access to the Lada initially and that’s why we started hating the Moskvitch. Or it was the build quality. See if you are Russian or Ukrainian you remember the Moskvitch made in the USSR. We had the Moskvitch made in Bulgaria, a country that never produced cars before and it never produced cars since then - mainly because we lack local steel production and don’t have a lot of iron ore on hand. So the Moskvitch in one part of the union was a very different car from the Moskvitch in another part of the union.
The ZAZ Zaporozhets was another example of a car that worked well in the cold weather of Russia but failed miserably and overheated in the hot summer weather of Bulgaria. That car was more times on fire than actually driving.
Btw did you had access to the VAZ-2101 in the 70s? We had it later in the 80s and it was very rare. So rare in fact that we had a song about it 🤣
You get the anti-commie on German cars. Pretty sure every parts supplier attempted to stamp “made in West Germany” on as many parts as possible on my 7 series. Hella even shoehorned it into the taillight lens mold.
I used to see these on thr SKF bearing i sold at NAPA. I thought it was like uniform steel stamp roller or something never even thought of Comrade USSR
You don’t know how many of those bearings he’s got packed in cosmoline. He could be set until 2500.
Da comrade, I have new zuperglass from east Germany and vacuum tubes new in box from 60s-70s USSR
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfest
TL;DR Best drinking glasses ever made, practically unbreakable compared to regular drinking glasses, no longer produced because no commercial company is interested in a product so good it hurts future sales.
And i fucking hate everyone for this.
So much so that i tried to figure out how to make my own
You havent seen cosmoline until you crack open a crate of mosins.
I remember dad getting a Mosin back in the late '80s. It came wrapped in brown paper and was basically a block of cosmoline. He put it in a cardboard box by the wood stove and let it melt for weeks.
I wrapped mine in rags and left it in a black trash bag in the sun for a week. What a mess.
I got my first Mosin for Christmas from my dad in 2008. We went to the gun store and I picked out the one I wanted it and i picked out a numbers matching 1944 M44 Izzy. He got me it and one of the original lead sealed spam cans of ammo and I’m pretty sure the spam can of ammo cost more than the rifle did lol. I spent almost all day Christmas Day cleaning the cosmoline out and off that thing the hard way and still didn’t get it all. When I bout my second one a 1929 Tula hex receiver I had learned my lesson and disassembled it and set the pieces on a tray next to the heat register with 2 space heaters blowing on it for a couple days.
I can still smell it. And its still on things. So much fucking cosmoline. Only thing I miss is the price of those crates.
My SKS was full of cosmoline when I got it. It was an absolute pain to clean out.
Don’t forget your jiggle test unless you like slam fires 😂
I've put around 1000 rounds through it so far and have only had one malfunction, and shut my fingers in the bolt while clearing it.
https://imgur.com/a/oJA0WTO
When you get the rifle, you are actually just buying cosmoline, the rifle is free!
Ugh, God I forgot about the fucking cosmoline. Scrubbing the absolute shit out of a Mosin with kerosene and then having to BAKE the rest of it out of the goddamn stock was awful.
Soak it in wd40 for a hour or so and youre good to go
AK parts packed in it are the best
And the wonderful smell
Grease them every 2-3 years?
3.6 at the most.
Not great, not terrible.
BECAUSE IT (I) DIDNT
THERE'S NO GREASE ON THE ROOF
RBMK BEARINGS DO NOT WEAR OUT
Send him 2-3 years Dagestan and forget.
the Dagestan to "being eaten by whatever Carrion birds they have in Ukraine" pipeline is a lot shorter than 2-3 years now.
Yuri say everything fine.
Da comrade. Relube. Reinstall.
My dad has a Lada that was imported to the US by a collector. It has a ton of new old stock parts that say “Made in USSR”, like on the oil filter even.
I had a Lada when I lived in Finland many years ago. That car was TOUGH. I even rolled it in a field after sliding on black ice, it barely damaged it.
James May featured one in an episode of «Cars of the people». Thing was built solid.
My parents actually had one when I was a kid. Shitty car though.
It had its quirks. The heater worked great, but only for the front seats. The rear was freezing. It would start immediately with the choke on at 40 below. It would do 100 km/h max, the cruise control was just put it in fourth and jam your foot on the floor. But it never let me down.
If I ever needed parts, they were plentiful because like a VW Beetle it was the same car from like 1966 to 1985, so the scrap yards were full of cheap parts. In 1992 when the USSR fell the Russians came over the border into Finland and bought every single one, because there was no tax on used cars.
I drove a Lada down a Comms access track in half a meter of snow. It was so steep that at the top, you couldn't see the bottom and when i went over the edge my nose was almost pressed against the glass. I fleetingly thought "if the front digs in it will flip end for end" it didnt, it crawled, growled, whined, n sledged its way to the bottom largely intact. I was amazed, n it wasn't my car
I think the best Lada quote is "You can fix it with a rock and a piece of wire, the problem is you have to fix it with a rock and a piece of wire."
I have a Ural motorcycle that’s the same thing. I got a bunch of parts in storage that are USSR/CCCP stamped
And you can replace ural air filter with fishing line. Just remember to add a hook, that it is factory standard. (you can take the line and hook to go fishing if bike breaks
Getting Ural parts was a challenge dealing with Russian post office, then I found a source in Spain and a few other places I could get stuff domestically. Solid bikes, even if under powered and heavy.
And the unlimited torque, that front and rear tyre are going their own path.
A Lada? Your father must be well connected! We waited 10 years for Zaporozhets!
Context: When those cars were new you had to order them through a waiting list which usually took 10-15 years. You couldn’t choose a car but well placed people with the ruling class could persuade the list to give them a Lada or a Volga. For a Volga you basically had to be a politician or high ranking military officer. A Lada was given to mid or low level bureaucrats. The common people got Moskvich, Zaporozhets or Trabant depending on the family size. If you had foreign contacts buying an Opel or a Ford was easier but it costed as much as a house so usually only oligarchs would buy foreign cars.
That’s why people from the Eastern Bloc hate those cars with a passion. They were literal symbols of oppression and your place on the caste hierarchy. My family was barred from owning a car since my great grandmother was a nurse in Nazi Germany. My grandfather had to work 5 years in Libya and buy a Ford from there or we would have to roll around on bicycles for the rest of our lives.
Very interesting. My dad has no Eastern European heritage but he collects fiats and has the lada for its relation to the fiat 124. It popped up for sale by chance and he got it. We know a bit about their history but not their full context.
Out of curiosity at what point in time did they become more common place for regular people? Cuz I know now they are considered cheap beaters over there. Obviously I know it’s decades later now though.
It’s a lada 2106 from 1984 btw.
The one related to Fiat 124 wasn’t actually called Lada initially. Domestically we called them Zhiguli) and they were sold under the Lada brand outside the union.
Zhiguli/VAZ-2101 became common among regular people in the 80s so around 10 years after it was officially released. Maybe it was more common in Russia but around the satellites like my country Bulgarian we mostly got Moskvitch 408 which was designed in the 60s. We had it since we had local production of it. It was a really crappy car, very heavy yet quite small on the inside and the thing had as much power as a lawnmower. It had 50bhp on paper with a curb weight of 1000kg. In reality it had maybe 40bhp if you got lucky and it wasn’t built by a drunk mechanic. Later on we got the upgraded Moskvitch 412. Which was better but still basically a toy when compared to the Ladas. You will notice something about the Moskvitch especially if you’re an American, those cars were a total design ripoff of the Buicks and Cadillacs of the time. Almost all Soviet cars were rip offs of American or European cars. Even the Zhiguli as you said was basically a Fiat with smaller engine and worse build quality.
Funny thing about the Zhiguli. The deal with the Italians was that they would give us the design and the patent for the car and in exchange the Soviets would supply Fiat with steel. The problem was that Soviet steel was the worse steel you could buy. Fiat realised that when the shipments started to arrive and the steel was rusted out of the box. They scrapped the deal but the Soviets had the designs already so they started producing Zhiguli. If you have Fiat 124 however you will notice that it has better engine, better parts and better build quality. The Zhiguli was the original Fiat from Wish.com sort of thing.
The best thing about Soviet cars is that they are so simple that they are perfect as a learning car for a beginner mechanic. They had to be simple as we didn’t had professional mechanics in the union. You either fix your own car or you are walking today. That’s why you would find amazing modifications on those cars - everything from the obligatory structural duct tape to fitting a smuggled BMW engine on a Lada 🤣
I disagree. In my opinion moskvich was much better than lada of the time. Yes , it was not a race car but it was very reliable and could take a beating. If something went wrong one could fix almost anything with basic tools on the side of the road. Ladas weren't too bad either but they were less suited for bad roads and had rust problems. I don't know about how it was in Bulgaria, but in ex USSR countries nobody hated that cars and generally people have fond memories associated with them. Again, they weren't much in comparison with American or European contemporary makes, but they were good enough for their place and time.
Maybe it was because we hadn’t access to the Lada initially and that’s why we started hating the Moskvitch. Or it was the build quality. See if you are Russian or Ukrainian you remember the Moskvitch made in the USSR. We had the Moskvitch made in Bulgaria, a country that never produced cars before and it never produced cars since then - mainly because we lack local steel production and don’t have a lot of iron ore on hand. So the Moskvitch in one part of the union was a very different car from the Moskvitch in another part of the union.
The ZAZ Zaporozhets was another example of a car that worked well in the cold weather of Russia but failed miserably and overheated in the hot summer weather of Bulgaria. That car was more times on fire than actually driving.
Btw did you had access to the VAZ-2101 in the 70s? We had it later in the 80s and it was very rare. So rare in fact that we had a song about it 🤣
Garage54 does all kinds of crazy things to Ladas.
Some of the trucks seen rolling into Ukraine had Made in USSR tyres!
https://www.reddit.com/r/LessCredibleDefence/s/WDDBqtrNOy
You get the anti-commie on German cars. Pretty sure every parts supplier attempted to stamp “made in West Germany” on as many parts as possible on my 7 series. Hella even shoehorned it into the taillight lens mold.
Fun little reminders of the past.
USSR Bearings: for make permanent revolution, comrade!
"Putting the 'roll' in Proletariat"
You mean the “role”?
Put it in H.
She’ll go 300 hectares on a single gallon of gasoline.
I think it was kerosene?
It was kerosene! I was typing too quickly.
context?
It’s a reference to the Simpsons when Homer goes shopping for a new car.
Specifically, this scene
Single tank of kerosene
what is this referring to?
See above - The Simpsons. From when it used to be funny (ok, that's only my opinion): https://youtu.be/iiq3A4Y4644
What country is this car from?
It no longer exist.
RIP the Holy Roman Empire
Could be new old stock tbf
I bought a couple of years ago a tap for a big thread. It was unused and made in USSR.
Grease them every 5 years. We call it the five year plan
Shame there a stupid ass caption in the way, this is a kick-ass photograph
In soviet Russia, bearing roll you.
Pretty cool.
at work we have a lathe with a big СССР badge on it
"Bearing is fine."
OUR bearing
Could be a super NOS or something lol
in Soviet russia bearing greases you
I used to see these on thr SKF bearing i sold at NAPA. I thought it was like uniform steel stamp roller or something never even thought of Comrade USSR
Unrelated question but does anyone know what the purpose of those 3 scribe marks on the shaft are? What put them there and why?