II. TIRE MANUFACTURING MACHINERY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP62-00328A000100440005-3
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 9
• Document Creation Date: December 9, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 25, 1998
• Sequence Number: 5
• Content Type: REPORT

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II. Tire Manufacturing Machinery
A. Sino-Soviet Bloc Supply Position
By Western standards, most of--the tire-building machinery installed in
the Sino-Soviet Bloc tire plants is obsolete. For example, the best factory in
the USSR - the major Bloc tire producer - is said to be the Moscow Tire Plant.
This plant is basically the old Ford "River Rouge" plant which was sent to the
USSR under "Lend-Lease" during World War II. The equipment for this plant was
built in 1935-1936 and is now more than 20 years old. While additions and re-
placements have been made since, the plant remains obsolete, requires a dispro-
portionate amount of mannual labor, and boasts of few modern innovations. The
other tire plants in the Bloc are not believed to be any better equipped.
Tire-manufacturing machinery is produced in the USSR, Fast Germany, Czecho-
slovakia, and in Communist China. However, only the USSR, East Germany, and Czecho-
l
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Wit'
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slovakia have any significant production 4 As a result the Sino-Sovi Bloc ~/~ , et as a
whole relies heavily on Western )chinery to is tire plants. The USSR, i
1957, signed a contract with the United Kingdom for the purchase of a modern tire3
plant with an annual capacity of 2 million tires at a c,st expected to exceed 28
iu1111Vii uu.L.i_a.rso also unaer the terms of the c tt~~ ussian trade agree-
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ment, Prance was to export 50 tire presses to the USSR in 1957 and another
50 before the end of 1959. On the other hand, the Bloc has also engaged in some
exports of tire-manufacturing machinery . Indonesia ordered a tire plant from
Czechoslovakia in 1956, and East Germany has offered to supply such machinery
to Uruguay.
Judging from Russian orders for tire manufacturing equipment from the
West and from complaints in th- Soviet press about mat domestic-
ally produced equipment, it appears evident that the Russians are not producing
enough of the necessary types of machinery to satisfy their requirements, and
the equipment which is being manufactured is technica7ily obsolete.
T The USSR tire equipment production capability is substantially supple-
mented by two plants in Czechoslovakia and Fast Germany. Thus the Bloc could
probably get along without purchases of Western equipment. However, the USSR
is interested in buying the most up-to-date machinery - which thus far has been
available only in the West - in order to augment its tire-making capacity-mope
-qvAw)ft and to increase the productivity of X_1 existing plants.
B. HEMMUa Tire-making Machinery Production and Production Problems
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USSR has published no statistics on(quantity of production and little inform-
ation on the types of machinery being produced. Several plants are manufact-
uring tire-making along with other types of machinery, the largest
and most specialized(being the Bolshevik Chemical Machinery Plant in Kiev.
7wd51'N o~
n~'he product-mix and the quality of equipment is inadequate to meet the needs
of the tire industry. Rubber mixers and calenders produced in 1956 were no
different from those produced 20 years ago. The mixers are produced in only
one type-size and with a single shaft-speed, although the rubber industry re-
type-sizes
quires three i ce.r of mixers and the shafts of large mixers should have
two speeds. Cord calenders have speeds less than half of those of the best
Western types, with a primitive and inefficient system of regulating the thick-
ness of the rubber layer. As a result, the variation of thickness is ten times
as great as in modern calender designs. Only individual vulcanizers are pro-
duced for motor vehicle tires. Consequently, the tires must be ,inlded prior
to vulcanizatio and a large number of vuJ frh molds must be used, whereas
modern tire plants usefvulcanizerjc for this purpose.
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A Soviet engineer, writing on the technology of tire production in the June
1957 edition of Mekhanizatsiya Trudoyemkikh i Tyzhelykh Rabot ( Mechanization of
Labor-Consuming and Heavy Work), stated that the USSR is increasing the mechaniza-
tion of her tire plants, but that many basic and auxiliary processes have not as
yet been mechanized. Thus loading and unloading, distribution, and storage opera-
(_XnMOjI
tions should be fully mechanized since they require a large amount o4 labor. To.
C 4
, he
stated, the USSR had designed a
standard hopper storage for
carbon black and had planned a system of worm conveyers for Jots- tkK di 10n
to the hoppers and for unloading.Ainw. The introduction of t automatic
I
equipment' r xing p!' carbon black would, according to the writer, permit an
annual saving mf in excess of 20 million rubles. He admitted, however, that
mechanized storage facilities were being built so slowly that not one of them
had been put into actual operation at the time of his writing.
The writer also described in groat detail an installation for automatic
weighing and feeding of raw materials into rubber mixers used in}modern tire
plants in Great Britain and in the United States e construction of a
similar 2m automatic system in the USSR was delayed intolerably long and an
exi:;erimental unit is only now being set up in the Voronezh Tire Plant."
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Discussing machinery used for the vulvanization of tire casings, the writer
stated that the most modern equipment available are tire presses. These come
in two different designs, the "autoform" and "Bag-o-matic" types, which, he
intimated, should be adopted by the Soviet tire-making industry. "In introducing
tire presses, it is necessary to replace old vulcanization equipment (auto-
claves) with new, but it is impossible to do this immediately in all USSR tire
plants. Therefore, they are mechanizing the recharging of autoclaves and molds,
'/
but these operations are being carried out too slowly. An example is the long_
delay in the designnws * for magnetic presse
au "t. t Ot ~ .iV
!ant and Rezinoproyekt; The us"e of
modernized presses will significantly Increase the productivity of labor.
oYa system of complex mechanization of the finishing operations in-
volved in the manufacture of tire _wkddhb(-had been taiin at t'r.e
Moscowre A ant, is being intolerably delayed".
The article goes on to say that plants are not sufficiently mechanizing the
assembly of tire casings and tubes, nor the tire storage and handling opera-
tions, Finally, it stressed the urgent need for installing electronic dam de-
tits
vices to control the production of 1mo*s for it tire casings, for auto-
d
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Bess of rubber-coatingtire cord. Owing to a number of design defects, the ar-
//11 acat4 C
ticle stated, it is impossible to manufacture material of cinsistently eo=wmt
sizes on wd=Ltng available calendars, modern technology makes
it possible to increase significantly the accuracy of calender operations. How-
ever, the several Soviet research institutes responsible for developing calenders
and cutting machines are lagging badly behind in solving the problems of installing
the necessary electronic control devices.
Difficulties were reported in 1956 at the Bolshevik Plant in Kiev. The
plant was scheduled to design and produce 16 new and modernized models of tire-
making machinery, Of these, only one was produced on schedule, and eleven
were delayed for periods up to 4 months. This poor record was due to the inade-
quate organization of the design department and to inefficiency in industrial
administration and supply. Significant also is a 1955 report from a Kirov
tire plant that its machinery was mostly obsolete, but that the new machinery
supplied to the plant was less productive than the old. The plant itself built
3 models of machines for assembling large tires apparently because it could not
obtain the necessary machinery elsewhere.
2. Czechoslovakia
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manufacturing machinery in Czechoslovakia... its products is a four-stage
r
automatic vulcanizer press. the p.aat' su j::ed..--2T-1 vY irecY~
hx!195 ,
~ ~,
?ul 1,
Under the arrangement, Indonesian workers
were to be trained by the staff of the Buzuluk Plant.
Delieveries of equipment
to Indonesia began in 1956 and ended in the fall of 1957. It is interesting
to note that the Buzuluk Plant was one of several criticized by the Soviet press
~~ ref
in 1957 for defective goods,
3. East Germany
The Ernst Thaelman Plant in Magdeburg, reportedly the largest heavy
machinery plant in East Germany, pr-duees various types of heavy equipment includ-
ing tire-manufacturing machinery. Its product mix includes automatic tire heaters
and presses (25 per month in 1955), rubber mixers (seven per month) and rubber
rolling mills (30 per year).
Most of the output is exported to the USSR, some
Q 1 ate. , J
,,s?report~
to other European satellites.. ere is aa.ee the
offer to supply tire-making machinery to Uruguay.
G
erman
of an East
4? Communist China
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machinery. A Chinese radio broadcast of October 1955 reported .that the Dairen
machinery plant manufactured numerous sets of machines for the tire industry --
rubber mixers, smelters, and rubber cutting machines. These machines were
K
being produced for the first time in China and were all reportedly automatically
N
controlled. Several other Chinese plants manufacture a few types of tire machinery.
The Chinese announced in April
1958 that "they must increase the number of
types of rubber equipment and molds for automobile, bicycle, and. cart tires,
never fearing complexity, so that after two years we will km basically be able
to produce all rubber equipment." It appears to be a good guess that the
two-year goal for self-sufficientcy in"rubber equipment" is overly optimistic,
and that China will continue to depend on imports for the more complex types of
machinery available.
C. Outlook
((gam" --~
~Lc
There is 1~doubt, that,given,the necessary priority, the USSR heavy
equipment industry could produce modern, up-to-date tire-making machinery. The
obsolescence of models currently produced and the dp grtproblems incurred -+r
I%i7`(1_)
f
ratesits ,.e? t
of machinery in the Soviet economy which concen
Annro iPrl. F r Rplpa8
p,?c;PanssQn 0
.99ig$~kQM QQ00M5y3 supporting industries,
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and's 'less immediately important industries as long as their shortcomings
do not interfere with priority projects or unduly impede the over-all-progress
of the economy. The ready availability of 'estern tire-making equipment of the
latest design - such as is now actively being sought by the USSR - will mitigate,
if not eliminate, a number of the production difficulties encountered by Soviet
~ Nt~ ~~'~ t M
tire
4r.bWag in ustries. There is
co
ample precedent for assuming that Russian engineers will. carefully the
new machinery and assembly lines received from the West and produce them in
their own plants in sufficient quantities to meet growing requirements. In
this manner, the Soviet tire-making industry can be completely modernized at
a minimum cost in labor
and materials, leaving research facilities and engineering skill free
to pursue more strategically important projects.
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