Practical Classics

READER RESTORATION
Stroke of
GENIUS
An early bond with DKW s two stroke led to
Paul Collins’ mission to build the best he could
WORDS NIGEL BOOTHMAN PHOTOS JONATHAN JACOB
O
ur photographer, Jonathan,
certainly has his creative ears
on today. ‘It sounds like a coffee
percolator,’ he says. Then, ‘Oh
hang on, it’s more like the Crazy
Frog now that you’ve revved it.
Ring-a-ding-ding, DING DING.’
He’s not far wrong, actually. The chirpy twostroke engine is a DKW hallmark, a marque that
was never a common sight in the UK and so
might warrant formal introduction.
The name Damp Kraft Wagen – or ‘steamdriven car’ – comes from an ancient prototype,
but it actually sold two-stroke motorbikes to
start with, branching out into cars and then
merging with Audi, Horch and Wanderer to
form Auto Union in 1932. DKW developed a
three-cylinder engine after the war that kept it
going through various models until 1963, when
the F12 we see here was launched. It was still
using it in 1966 when Volkswagen bought DKW
and turned the final F102 model into an Audi.
A young Paul Collins received a DKW F102 as
a
e
t
h
o
o
e
48 SEPTEMBER 2016 // PRACTICAL CLASSICS
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Practical Classics Restorer of the Year
AS FOUND
Paul flew out to Norway to look at this F102 and ended up
driving it back home, though he says, ‘the terrible brakes
made it easily the most terrifying journey I’ve ever had.’
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PRACTICAL CLASSICS // SEPTEMBER 2016 49
READER RESTORATION
THE RESTORER
Decades of very different motoring followed, as Paul
worked his way through Alfasuds, a Renault 16 and a
rallying career that included the RAC Rally in 1994 and
’95. But nostalgia struck in 2006 and Paul joined the DKW
club. He heard of a Norwegian member with an F102 that
might be available and flew over to look at it.
‘I ended up driving it back,’ says Paul. ‘It was one of
the most terrifying journeys I’ve ever had – the brakes
were terrible.’ Paul rebuilt the brakes and suspension but
serious chassis rot eventually caused it to fail its MoT.
Paul had to lift the body and make temporary repairs.
‘It wasn’t good, but it was cheap,’ he says. ‘And I didn’t
want to get into it properly until I’d built myself a garage
to do the work in.’
Ah yes. Being a teach-yourself, get-on-with-it kind
of chap, Paul constructed a very attractive stone-built
double garage with a tiled roof. It took two years, so it
‘Paul was horrified
at the state of the
DKW’s chassis when
he removed
ed the body’
Paul Collins’s job regularly
sends him to Germany, which
can be handy when you’re hunting
out carpets for an unusual 50-yearold German runabout. He used
to work for British Aerospace,
which had its perks – ‘There
was a 100-ton press I could
use to assemble DKW
crankshafts!’
TECH SPEC
Engine 889cc/3-cyl/TS
Powerr 40bhp@4500rpm
Torque 58lb ft@2250rpm
Gearbox 4-speed manual
0-60mph 23sec (est)
Top speed 78mph
Fuel economy
y 40mpg
Weight 734kg
w £800 (1963)
Price new
Value now
w £3250
was 2013 before Paul could begin work on the sort of
restoration he felt the DKW deserved.
Stripped and flipped
Paul made a tilting device to simplify bodyshell repairs
before splitting the body and chassis again, but was
horrified at the state of the chassis when he removed
the body. ‘I was cutting out sections a foot long,’ he says.
When he had finished welding he sent the chassis
away to be sandblasted and painted black, at which
point he wrapped it in…cling-film. No, really.
‘It looked as good as new and the best way of
keeping it like that is to wrap it in something
close-fitting that’s easy to remove. Cling-film’s
just the job.’ With the body mounted on a jig,
the first chore was to scrape off tenacious
German underseal. Only after this could Paul
see the full extent of the work needed to the
floors, sills, inner and wings. It wasn’t pretty.
‘The front panel was so far gone that I had to
remove the headlamp bowls, recreate the
whole headlamp surround using a wooden
former to shape the new metal, then weld the
extensively repaired headlamp bowls back in,’
he says. Matters weren’t made any easier by
Paul sourced carpets
the fact that Paul set himself time-consuming
and some soft trim from
high standards as he repaired the shell.
a German supplier.
50 SEPTEMBER 2016 // PRACTICAL CLASSICS
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Practical Classics Restorer of the Year
Here’s how Paul did it
1
FEB 2014
Flipping hell
Paul mounted the shell on
a home-made jig, then spent hours
removing old underseal – and rust.
Paul refused to start restoring
his DKW until he’d finished
building his two-car garage.
‘I didn’t want people to be able to tell it had been
welded at all, so I made the panels in such a way as to
replicate the shapes and contours of what was there
and butt-welded every join.’
Easier said than done. The front corner of the floor, for
example, has a tapered depression where it mounts on
to the chassis. So did Paul rescue a body press from the
old factory in Ingolstadt? No – but it turns out you can
build a press-jig to use in a vice – if you have the skills.
‘I made a tapered hardwood former and a metal
pressing plate,’ says Paul. ‘Panels tended to distort when
pressed in the vice, so I had to remove them, flatten
them, press them a bit more and so on.’ He admits that
he didn’t get every section spot-on first time and soon
discovered that endless welding can get a bit tedious.
‘I broke up the welding work by stripping all the moving
parts from the chassis and getting them blasted and
painted, from the pedal box to the suspension.’
2
MAY 2014
DIY panel pressing
One of several repair sections
Paul made using hardwood formers. This
is the front nearside corner of the floor.
4
3
SEP 2014
Clinging on
5
MAR 2015
Mind the gaps
That’s cling-film carefully
applied to the chassis following extensive
repairs, blasting and thick black paint.
JAN 2015
Good as new
The engine and gearbox were
stripped, checked and rebuilt. Here the
aluminium gearbox case looks perfect
following the vapour-blasting process.
Plating and polishing
All the fixings and small metal items (think brake calipers
downwards) were looking very tired, with poor-quality
plating flaking off and allowing corrosion to take hold.
So what did Paul do about it? ‘I bought a plating kit for
about £50,’ he says. ‘You get a zinc anode and a plating
solution, so you connect the piece you want to plate as
the cathode and hook everything to a car battery via a
little rheostat. Zinc ions leave the anode and plate the
item to a depth of 10 microns, so it won’t foul the threads
on nuts and bolts.’
Paul had rebuilt the engine two years
previously when the car was running poorly
and eventually traced the problem to
corrosion in the bores. However, he stripped
everything again in the spirit of thoroughness
and sent the aluminium components off for
vapour blasting, a process Paul is a big fan of.
f
‘Tiny beads of glass are blasted in a stream
of water so it cleans rather than abrades. It gives
a brilliant finish on aluminium.’ The cylinder head and ¾
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Paul filled along the length of
the car, covering the door gaps, then
sanded it and re-cut the gaps.
6
JUNE
2015
Shell
painted
Outstanding
finish in Zenit
Blau is straight
out of the gun
– Paul says
that investing
in a top-notch
spray gun
made a huge
d e e ce
difference.
PRACTICAL CLASSICS // SEPTEMBER 2016 51
READER RESTORATION
WHAT’S IT LIKE TO DRIVE
When pressed, two-stroke
triples make a sound that
suggests howling, rallybred performance. You
soon realise there’s far
more noise than thrust,
but another two-stroke
characteristic – the little
lunge you get away from a
standstill – means it never
feels sluggish. What it
mainly feels is light – in
mass, in effort through the
controls and in the amount
of sun streaming into the
cabin. The agreeable
column shift adds period
character to the clean and
sharp Sixties interior
design. There is plenty of
supple body roll but
a lively, jiggly ride –
I reckon that if you ran
over a centipede,
you’d be able to count
how many legs it had.
It all adds up to
a giant portion of fun
in a box the size of
a Happy Meal.
RIGHT Audi ringss
embossed onto
o
the fuel filler a nod
d
to DKW’s history..
BELOW Simple,
stylish dashboard
features Art
Deco-style
speedometer.
The four rings represent the four amalgamated
makers of 1932 – Audi, DKW, Horch and Wandererer.
gearbox got the same treatment and with glossy,
cling-wrapped components littering the garage, it
was time for Paul to start body preparation ahead
off painting.
USEFUL
CONTACTS
No door gaps!
Paul tidied and fixed the bolt-on panels in place, then
fitted the doors. Then he skimmed body filler along
the length of the car – covering over the door gaps.
‘I shaved it with a 14in body board – a kind of
Velcro-backed thing like a surform that grips
a piece of sandpaper. It was 80-grit first, then 320
to get it smooth.’ When Paul felt both sides were
satisfactory, he cut the filler in the door gaps with
a hacksaw blade and then rounded off the edges to
a consistent gap size. The bolt-on panels became
bolt-off panels for a period and were painted one
by one on trestles. Paul laboriously masked the
body inside and painted outside – then vice versa,
which is necessary to avoid overspray from the fog
of airborne paint you get in a home garage with no
proper extractor fan.
The interior trim was another tour de force for
Paul’s DIY approach. He bought an industrial sewing
machine online for £350, removed the seat covers,
unpicked the stitching and cut new pieces to match
the panels of old vinyl before sewing them together.
‘I reckon I saved £1500,’ says Paul. ‘I could have
saved even more as I meant to sell the sewing
machine, but once you’ve got a nice piece of kit…’
52 SEPTEMBER 2016 // PRACTICAL CLASSICS
DKW Owners Club UK,
www.dkw.org.uk
Gateros Plating, (Plating
kits) gaterosplating.co.uk
Franz-Josef Döpper,
(Carpet & trim materials)
doepper-profile.de
Audi Tradition, (Used DKW
parts) trshop.audi.de
Frans van Leur, (Crank)
fransvanleur@hotmail.com
Paul saved another £450 by embarking on
a two-day marathon of swearing and muttering as
he set about fitting the headlining he made using
his sewing machine. He tracked the carpet material
down to a supplier in Germany that Paul visited on
a business trip. The company wasn’t yet able to
accept credit cards, but that doesn’t matter when
you’re dealing with nice people. ‘The owner simply
shook my hand, drew up an invoice to pay when I got
home and with that I walked out with £200 of fabrics
and carpet,’ says Paul.
Hours of work
k saw the car MoT’d four days before
a club trip to Germany in July 2015. The car that
eventully emerged was a seriously high-quality
restoration that blended ingenuity and a curiosity to
learn with patience and no little natural talent.
Small car, big effort – huge result. Q
PC RESTORER OF THE YEAR
This restoration was
selected for both the
quality of the work and
the ingenuity of the
restorer in completing it.
As well as appearing in
Practical Classics it is
also entered into Britain’s
most prestigious car
restoration competition,
Restorer of the Year.
The annual competition
runs for 13 issues and
includes each and every
readers restoration story
featured on the pages of
this magazine in that
time, at the end of which
the best cars are chosen
by you, the readers of
Practical Classics.
Watch this space for
further information on
Restorer of the Year 2017.
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