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I have never seen a worse engraving then on this Soviet helicon


Or are there even worse engravings out there?

(link to add: https://www.kleinanzeigen.de/s-anzeige/ ... 1-74-9215 )

That's about par for the course re: Soviet.

Additionally, Soviet-era workmanship completely reminds me of c. 1980 Jinbao workmanship.

Looks like it was engraved with a spork...

...or by me.

The Soviets specialized in being the worst!...

You guys are being way too hard on poor Vasily. He had to engrave 10,000 of these things by hand with a broken nail file.

Think of it as “utilitarian.”

arpthark wrote: ↑Thu Mar 13, 2025 4:48 pm You guys are being way too hard on poor Vasily. He had to engrave 10,000 of these things by hand with a broken nail file.

The Soviets tended to be much more concerned with quantity (quotas) than quality or even utility. This is from a Newsweek article in 1957.

A nail factory at Kubishev (on the Volga River) is a model. Assigned a production quota, the manager proudly exceeded it - by producing nothing but small nails. When a shortage of large nails was reported by the Construction Trust, the quota standards were switched from number to weight, and the manager switched his production entirely to large nails to the exclusion of small. Seeing no quota advantage in medium nails, he had never made any.

If the head of the tuba factory thought this way Vasily would have probably had to engrave 40,000 single-rotor, 4’ 9 11/16” ‘tubas’ with 4.5” bells. If the tuba player in the Koigorodok Philharmonic had trouble playing Prokofiev 5 on it, well that was his problem.