UrBC, Yekaterinburg, January 12, 2016. Ural Vagon Corporation’s head plant is currently working to restore Exhibit 781 — the first Soviet tank fire support armored fighting vehicle designed at Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant in the mid-eighties - for the company’s Tankprom museum, the corporation’s press service reports.

Once the restoration jobs have been completed, the machine will become part of the museum’s permanent exhibition (to be opened in Nizhniy Tagil in 2020).

The vehicle, based on T72 tank, arrived in Nizhniy Tagil in badly damaged condition and with some parts missing. This has to do with the fact that the item was used as a test sample in Chelyabinsk for many years previously. Given that Exhibit 781 was made as early as 1988 and was never produced on a serial scale, restoring it proved a challenge for Ural Vagon Zavod.

‘First of all, our head plant’s design office experts had to work hard to restore all the drawings and diagrams. These are now used to recreate the machine’s outer look. The lion’s share of the restoration work lies with Ural Vagon Zavod’s Assembly Department, though, where all the missing parts have to get replaced, and with the Experimental Department, where the exclusive spare parts for Exhibit 781 need to be made,’ the press service says.