Volga Hydrofoils Messageboard

Anybody who had to take the gearbox appart will be surprised to see something very special, I would even say ''Jawbreaking''!
It is my job to sell marine gearboxes, therefor I know, that usually all gearboxes available on the market are vertical offset (plain, A- and V- drives) or coaxial types. But what we have seen when opening our gearbox was very unusual for marine use: A planetary gearbox! What a surprise! A planetary gearbox is by far more complicated to built, than a regular gearbox. The idea is to make a powertransfer via many gears rather than only one! The weardown of the gears is considerably lower, as the splitted powertransfer reduces the stress on a single tooth.

Again we can recognize, that the guys building these boats tried to use the best equipment possible and available. I couldn't help to make some photos and share this with all of us. One of them being attached, especially for those, who do not know what they have or what they had, but throw away or never found inside their boat. More of them to follow in a smaller size. Enjoy ....

more photos...

Gentlemen,

I try to keep my promise and enclose herewith some more photos.(The resolution quality is not very good, but the site does anyway not provide more than 250 kb as far as I understand, which seem to make us go hand-in-hand with nowaday's CCCP-5 years economical plan.)
What we see here, are parts of the gearbox of a '86 built Volga and probably nothing new for anybody who was not yet obliged to take the gearbox appart. Once you have taken something of a Volga appart to mend, you are either surprized how simple they made it or you are surprized about them using equipment which was by far not very common in the West. This gearbox is something like this! And dealing with marine gearboxes, I can tell you it is odd to see another approach to boat powertrain transmission technology. I do not particularly want to say that they did things better in the USSR, but they had to use available eastern technology, rather than importing (or copying western brand's V-drives reverse reduction gearboxes) from Europe or USA. In this case it is a rather expensive constructed planetary reverse reduction gearbox with a direction changing 1:1 V-drive gearbox assembly. Any boatbuilder in the West would have installed a Twindisc or ZF V-drive reverse reduction gearbox, which would have saved the boat some 50 - 60 kilos of valuable weight (last-not-least the weight of a well brested lady), but our CCCP chaps just couldn't, because it was neither available, nor did the funds allow them to import something and besides this they must have been (and most probably still are) gifted with enough skilled women, where they had to take only one, rather than us being urged to take more(!?)

Part showing an aluminium cover with clutch discs fitted. You may see how much they were worn out.
Easy to be replaced by bolting or rivetting new ones on it.

Hi Georg,

Thanks for the pictures! I had no idea about the 256KB limit for attachments. The forum software has a huge amount of settings, and I am afraid I didn't have a thorough look at all of them. Anyway, I immediately changed things, so now you can upload full-res images up to 5MB in size, and also 10 i,ages/attachments per message, so you do not need to post many times for showing more than 3 pictures...

So if you have some better resolution pictures available, don't hesitate to hit the "edit"-button and replace the grainy pics for some high-res material!

Dear Maurits,

Your mission regarding our Upgrading to Hi-Rez has been an outstanding success.
You are already able to find some of my valueable Hi-Rez pictures in the site and
you may enjoy my comments on them too ...

Best regards

Dear George,

Do you have any more pictures of the planetary gear box. My gear seems to be broken and I intend to pull it apart to check whats the problem. Would be good to know what I'm expecting to see.

Regards,

Jouko