DKW Auto-Union Project: August 2021

Starting with this post we will be discussing the project to reconstruct a 1948 IFA F9 pre-production car being undertaken by my DKW friend, Winfred Kuhl. Winfred has been a lifelong DKW enthusiast who operated DKW Karosserie in Germany, recreating prewar wooden DKW bodies for many years. Several years ago, he became interested in the 1940 DKW F9 and the idea of creating a replica began to bubble away in his mind. To build his replica he began searching for an early IFA F9 to use as a basis and that search led him to the discovery of the Estonian DKW F9 prototype. https://dkwautounionproject.blogspot.com/2017/06/a-second-dkw-f9-prototype-discovered.html
That car was eventually obtained by Audi Tradition historian, Ralf Friese. With two prototype DKW F9s now in existence, Winfred considered that his replica should be of the DKW F9’s next evolutionary step – the IFA F9, which first appeared in 1948. The story of the IFA F9’s challenging development is covered in detail here: https://dkwautounionproject.blogspot.com/2020/07/the-development-of-ifa-f9.html

This journey will be covered in many posts, but in order to start, we need to go back in time to 2011 in the German town of Nossen, in Saxony. Winfred takes up the story.

The Disposal of the workshop in Nossen

"Deep in his heart, Dieter Weigold was a communist. We know this from documents he left in his workshop showing he was a card-carrying member of a communist political party which had been banned in Germany in 1976. As we know, communism has a particular view about private property embraced by all its advocates – in case of emergency, private property can be declared as communal property.

Weigold’s particular emergency was the chronic lack of money in his pocket, so he decided not to pay the rent for his workshop in the town of Nossen, eastern Germany, in the hope that the owner of the building would agree to this decision in solidarity for the welfare of the DKW enthusiasts of the world...

The owner of the building felt differently however, and Weigold’s DKW workshop was closed by court order in May 2011 with the contents to be sold by public auction to clear his debts. As Weigold did not want any of his DKW friends to buy up his shop, he kept the matter secret and didn’t tell anyone about the auction, probably hoping to buy the contents back himself at a cheap price. His plan backfired however, as the lot was bought up by a speculator, who only wanted to make a quick buck on the deal.

Dieter Weigold called me in October 2011 and asked me to negotiate with the new owner as he realized the new owner was about to liquidate the workshop and dispose of its contents. Weigold wanted me to "at least save the collection of rare screws" for him [a German joke I think, ed.], so I did, and purchased the huge stockpile of parts from this workshop and promised the owner to have the building cleared out by 31 December 2011. So, the adventure began...

Sharp eyed enthusiasts will recognize the F89L Schnellaster above. It now has pride of place in the Audi Museum Mobile at Ingolstadt. The museum's extremely rare DKW F10 was purchased from Weigold in 2003. https://dkwautounionproject.blogspot.com/2017/06/audi-tradition-museum-ingolstadt.html

I first became interested in the F9 when I began clearing up Weigold’s immense collection of 3-cylinder-engines. The problem for me was that there was a mixture of western (DKW) and eastern (IFA) engines and I could not easily distinguish the difference. As I was only really interested in the DKW-engines, I asked some of the East German veteran friends I knew how to quickly spot the difference between them. The answer I received awoke my interest in the historical development of these engines. You can see the difference easily by looking at the three exhaust ports in the cylinder-block. If the ports are the same distance from each other, then it’s IFA. If the gaps between the ports are different, with the one gap smaller than the other, it’s DKW. Easy! I did not know that before and I immediately began to wonder when this change happened and how this related to the prototype engine? Did this change occur in Zwickau or in Ingolstadt?

This will be the topic of chapter 2 and I will show you pictures of a very early engine, you will see..."