decision himself
Chita, Squirrel, Ant: Soviet rare cars, cars
Yuri A. Dolmatovsky, Candidate of Technical Sciences, a talented engineer and artist, founder and theorist of the school of Soviet automobile design, a well-known writer, popularizer and journalist, was the main advocate of the wagon layout. A long time ago several generations of boys were brought up on the books and articles of Dolmatovsky, who tried to infuse us with his great passion for cars and support his “fellow mania”.
The birth and death of “Cheats”: the first Soviet car NAMI-013
Having completed the development of cargo bodies and trailed toilets, in 1949, Yuri Dolmatovsky, head of the bodywork bureau of the Scientific Automobile Institute (NAMI), began to fulfill his cherished dream – the creation of avant-garde car assemblies, which were then called trambuses. Thus was born the idea of a revolutionary car NAMI-013, which was developed by the engineer Konstantin Zeyvang and the artist-designer Vladimir Aryamov. Continue reading
Always fresh: why you can not constantly add oil instead of replacing?
With an oil appetite of more than a liter for a couple of thousand kilometers, a normal driver thinks about piston repair, and the abnormal stops changing oil at all, limited to refilling it. Of course, in the most extreme case, the presence of oil in the crankcase is more important than its quality, but during operation it is actively changing under the influence of aggressive chemistry and wear products. Cleaning with a filter does not ensure full restoration of its quality: it changes as the very basis of the oil, which causes it to become more liquid, and it works or drops out in the form of ash and soot in the places of overheating the additives present in it.
Topping up with new servings of oil slightly restores the amount of additives and fractional composition, but this measure is not enough for long. Quickly enough, the volume of new components is simply lost in the volume of the sludge accumulated in the engine crankcase, and the base number does not recover at all to a normal level. Continue reading
Five reasons to love and hate Lifan Smily
They say that if you see something that looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then this is a duck. But if something like the Mini flashes in the traffic, this does not mean that you actually saw the car of the famous British brand. It is possible that you caught a “Chinese” mimicking him by the name of Lifan Smily.
The Smily compact hatchback, belonging to the A segment, was first shown at the 2008 Beijing Motor Show. However, then he was called (and is still called) Lifan 320, and the name Smily was assigned to the model exclusively for the Russian market.
When someone says that Smily is a clone or a copy of Mini, this is at least not true. The car is really made with a big eye on the iconic minicar, but it is rather a “variation on the theme” than direct copying. Continue reading
