Tatra who doesn’t know his brother. In Ostrava, they have the longest car the company has ever produced

The vehicle, together with other technologies, such as special saws, was part of an investment totaling 90 million crowns, which allows Liberty to make final adjustments to the threaded rods.

“We needed the car for one reason: We need to transport internally long rods from the medium-rolling mill to the service center, and the rods are sometimes up to 24 meters long. Therefore, standard trucks are not suitable and wagons cannot be used,” said Pavel Suchánek .

The car is 25.3 meters long. It is powered by a 300kW Tatra engine with an Allison automatic transmission. The original chassis of the Tatra Force model line has six axles, to which Partner Ipex has added a seventh. This achieved the required total load capacity of the car over 70 tons and a payload of approximately 50 tons. The first four axles are drive, the two front and the last three rear steered. The car also meets the parameters for operation on public roads, but it is not expected that it would leave the Liberty Ostrava complex.

“We had to move the cab in front of the front axle, thus putting the engine behind the cab,” said Vojtěch Svoboda, the sales director of the Partner Ipex company.

According to Svoboda, it was relatively easy to modify the car from a technical point of view. “Given the period in which the vehicle was built and what accompanied the automotive segment due to the covid, it was the most difficult to organize the whole thing so that we could meet the delivery date, so it was logistically demanding for all subcontractors to be able to deliver properly,” he said. Freedom. The reconstruction took ten months.

Tatra Marketing Director Kamil Košťál said that a lesson is used in the carmaker – the more axles, the more Tatra. “Tatra in some two or three axles in a row is not completely competitive in terms of price and added value, if I’m not talking about difficult terrain. But basically the more axles the customer requires, the more competitive it is. We are grateful for any such specialty. on the other hand, if we do only these specialties, it will not feed us, so we are happy for larger contracts, “said Košťál.

“The Tatras are traditionally considered to be vehicles for difficult terrain, but in this case another unique feature was used: The ability to build a chassis for extremely long loads,” he added.

The drivers for the special car have been looking for the smelter for more than half a year. In the end, she found Jiří Soldán, who was a driver of special army vehicles, and after leaving the army, he was interested in the opportunity to start working as a driver in steel mills.

“I have already driven the area several times to check where I can get to without any problems. I have to think that the rear part of the vehicle could extend beyond the road during a larger drive,” said Soldán. According to him, the only complication is sometimes a narrow passage, for example in the place of loading, where cars are waiting. According to him, the big advantage is that the car has five steerable axles.

Liberty Ostrava produces steel mainly for the construction, engineering and petrochemical industries. The annual production capacity of the company is 3.6 million tons of steel. Even with its subsidiaries, the company has 6,000 employees.

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