Suspension

The T-34 used a variant on the standard Christie suspension. In a normal Christie suspension system each wheel was mounted on an L-shaped bell crank. The wheel would be attached to the long end of the L, the crank would be attacked to the tank hull at the bend, and the short leg would be attached to a horizontally mounted spring. This system had two advantages – the sideways mounted springs could be made longer than vertically mounted springs, and the different length of the two sides of the crank turned a large amount of vertical movement into a much smaller horizontal movement.

On the T-34 all five road wheels were individually mounted, but the springs were all vertically mounted. Photographic evidence shows that the first road wheel used a slight modification of the Christie system, with the shorter branch of the bell crank located inside the tank, running back parallel to the longer wheel mounting, connecting to a strong spring. Despite the vertical mounting of the spring, this system did still produce the leverage effect of the bell crank, allowing a stiffer strong spring inside the tank to resist quite large movements of the front road wheel. The remaining four wheels used a rather more simple system. Behind each wheel there was a curved slot in the side of hull, with the suspension spring directly behind it. The wheel was mounted on a suspension arm that was connected to the tank by a strong axle just to the front of the wheel, and was also connected directly to the spring. The suspension arm forced any vertical movement of the wheel to follow a curved path, matching the gap in the side of the hull. The only element retained from the standard Christie suspension was that this system allowed the suspension springs to be mounted inside the tank.