Full Steam - Rasmussen's Steam Car

Photos Frieder Bach, Story Thomas Erdmann. First published in AUVC Magazine Vol 66 February 1991. The original article can be found here in my AUVC - https://auvc-archive.blogspot.com/2020/03/auvc-nachrichten-vol-66-feb-1991.html I have translated the story into English.

Maybe you are like me, whenever I heard about the legendary steam engine of the Zschopau engine works, I imagined one of those steaming monsters, several tons heavy with a big black chimney, similar to a locomotive on wheels. Just as I got to know you as a steamroller from my childhood in the 50s.

You can imagine my enthusiasm when club friend Frieder Bach from Chemnitz told me one day in a letter that he had obtained some private photos of the steam car from a former DKW employee in Zschopau, who came to Rasmussen as an apprentice in 1912. Until now (1991) no one had been able to say what this original DKWs really looked like. So I was all the more surprised to see a real automobile in the photos, significant in its dimensions, but far from my ideas of a coal-fired steam locomotive on wheels.

Here is the history of the steam car.

There are countless anecdotes in the more than 100 year history of the automobile, including that of Jorgen Rasmussen, the founder of Zschopauer Motorenwerkes / DKW, who, annoyed by the insufficient fuel allocation during the First World War, had repeated problems due to the fact that he had to travel almost 30 kilometers between his residence in Chemnitz and the plant in Zschopau in his Wanderer Puppchen.

So he thought about how he could make himself independent of the traditional gasoline-powered automobile. Steam power seemed to him a promising solution. After all, the Americans were already producing practical steam powered vehicles and, in addition, Rasmussen has been working with steam power for many years. His company, originally founded in Chemnitz in 1904 as Rasmussen and Ernst Maschinen und Apparatebau GMBH manufactured, among other things, heat-resistant valves and armatures for large scale stationary steam engines as well as grates and firings for steam boilers. In 1907 Rasmussen moved production to Zschopau, where he was able to acquire a former textile mill.

The First World War was good for business at the Zschopau factory was manufacturing primers and detonators for the army. In 1916 Rasmussen began to develop a steam car project, in which the army administration soon showed great interest and which supported by awarding the corresponding orders.

Ing.Mattiessen was assigned to lead the development work, while Rasmussen himself, a Dane who had gained relevant experience with the steam car manufacturers Doble and Stanley in the USA before the war, secured an example for the ambitious project.

A truck and a five-seater passenger car were planned. The drive unit consisted of a tubular steam boiler for pressure generation and a two-cylinder steam engine. A diesel oil burner was used to heat the steam boiler.

The steam boiler in the truck was located behind the driver's seat. In the passenger car it was placed under a massive "bonnet". The pipes in the steam boiler were heated by the oil burner. Once the pressure in the boiler had risen to around 1000 atu (atmospheres), it was transferred to the steam engine via appropriate control valves. The engine was arranged horizontally as a kind of "underfloor motor," connected directly to the rear axle and consisted of two cylinders lying side by side. Power was delivered directly to the rear axle without the interposition of a gearbox.

The performance and speed of the vehicle depended on the vapor pressure supplied to the two cylinders via the valves. PS (horsepower) details about the vehicle are not known. However, the employee related that the driving tests were anything but satisfactory. In theory, the steam car's should have had a driving range of around 90 kilometers. However, a variety of problems repeatedly restricted this radius of action. On the one hand there was the immense weight of the vehicle - the water tank alone held 500 liters. But water consumption was very high, which made frequent and time-consuming refueling necessary. Even so, water tanks were not available on the route from Zschopau to Chemnitz. In addition, the vehicle was unable maintain sufficient steam pressure, even at full load, to tackle the slopes of nearby mountains. Sometimes it proved necessary to have horses drag the vehicle back to the factory when technical problems arose.

Despite these failures, Zschopau continued to develop the steam car until 1921, when the project was finally terminated. Since the end of the First World War, the further development of the automobile clearly pointed in the direction of the less complex gasoline engine. The test vehicles and parts stood for a few years, so our employee remembers, in a hall on the factory premises, before they were scrapped.

In the meantime, Rasmussen, always looking for technically usable ideas, had taken on new project. At the end of 1918, at a time when the work on the steam car was still in full swing. Ing. Hugo Ruppe came to Zschopau. He had brought a small two-stroke engine with him, no more than a toy, but this little engine already gave an idea of the possibilities that were in it.

The knowledge gained from the construction of these toy engines, of which around 1,000 were produced, was used to develop an auxiliary bicycle engine, the ancestor of the DKW motorcycles that were so successful in the years that followed.

The steam car was soon forgotten.

All that was left was the initials of this project - DKW. Rasmussen had already protected this as a trademark in the early stages of the experiments, together with a brand emblem that showed a volcano framed by the three letters. As late as 1922, this emblem adorned the letterheads of the Zschopau engine factories and also the advertising posters for the bicycle auxiliary engine show the smoking volcano in the background.

Remembrance of the dream of a steam car?


In any case, the three letters found a new meaning. The steam car became "The Boys Wish" for the toy engine and the bicycle assist engine quickly became "The little miracle", proving to be effective advertising ideas, which would eventually lead to development of the largest motorcycle factory in the world.