IvchenkoOleksandr

Romanians say drujbă to describe an instrument that could be used to cut an old tree or firewood for a fire.

In Ukraine, we also say “xerox” instead of copier, “pampers” instead of diapers, “kiwi” instead of “Actinidia chinensis”. There are other words in this list: dictaphone, flomaster, scotch, thermos and even, it’s hard to believe! — unitas. All these words are trademarks that once became so popular that they became proper nouns.

In Romania, the chainsaw “Druzhba”, designed in 1953 by Ukrainian design engineer Oleksandr Ivchenko, who ran a research and development bureau in Zaporizhzhia back then, received the same sort of popularity at the time.

The chainsaw “Druzhba” was not the first in the world. The first chainsaws with petrol engines appeared in Germany in the 1920s. This chainsaw was not Ivchenko’s main achievement either, he is better known as the “designer of the hearts of aircrafts”. The aircraft An–22 “Antei”, passenger transport aircraft An–10 and An–24, designed in the Antonov Design Bureau, were equipped with Ivchenko’s engines.

But for those who were born and lived between the 1950s and 2000s, the chainsaw “Druzhba” has become a sort of legend. It was used not only for sawing wood, amateur designers quickly realized that if you remove the four-horsepower engine from the chainsaw and attach it to the right place, you can turn an ordinary bicycle into a scooter, an inflatable boat into a motorboat, or even become the owner of a snowmobile.

And even more, in the 1970s, students of the Moscow Aviation Institute decided to use these engines to lift ultralight helicopters X–3, X–4, X–5. The engines combined into eight blocks allowed the pilot (of course helicopters had one seat each) to climb to an altitude of 1,200 meters. The estimated flight range was 100 km and the maximum speed was 157 km/h.

Although the models attracted a lot of visitors’ attention at exhibitions in Havana, Milan, and Los Angeles, they remained experimental and did not enter mass production.

By the way, chainsaw “Druzhba” has become a generic name for all chainsaws not only in Romania, the same thing happened in Georgia. Google დრუჟბა and you will find chainsaws of various brands on this request.

Chainsaw “Druzhba”