In praise of Deeks
I thoroughly enjoyed reading the Auto-union/dkw 1000 Your classic in the May edition. My brothers and I owned no fewer than four DKWS – Das Kleine Wunder – in the early ’70s: in Belgium, where we grew up, they were both easy to come by and affordable.
We had two 1000s, a 1000S and an F102; they were remarkable cars and had plenty of go in them, as Jim Clark discovered in an Auto-union 3=6. They were highly sophisticated for early ’60s cars: the 1000S had inboard front disc brakes and a freewheel gearbox. They had an ignition coil per cylinder – the forerunner of modern pencil coils – and they were also very easy to work on because there was acres of space in the engine bay.
My brother and I were on a trip home to Belgium from university one summer when a piston blew. We removed and dismantled the engine by the side of the A2, cut off the conrod from the offending cylinder, Araldited the piston into the bore to prevent fuel loss through the inlet port, then reassembled. It ran straight away, went pretty well, and we drove it like that for nine months before replacing the engine.
On another occasion, the front crank roller bearing gave up. Using our mother’s oven, and some dry ice extracted from a CO2 fire extinguisher, we were able to remove the bearing and replace it with one from a spare engine.
When I borrowed the F102 to travel to Greece after graduation from high school, the front pads gave out on the way up to the St Bernard pass. We got all the way to Greece via Yugoslavia by using my mate’s Fiat 125 T Special as the brakes for both cars, with me glued to his rear bumper for the downward slopes, of which there were many. It ran like that until, two months later, we reached Germany and found some replacement pads. Quite an adventure.
The last DKW in the family was the F102, which my elder brother later borrowed from my younger brother for his honeymoon to Scotland. Unfortunately it broke down on the way, and he abandoned it by the side of the road. I’d love to know if someone rescued it, and if it is still around.
At around the same time, in 1971, I acquired a 1963 Sunbeam Alpine Series III, which I am still driving today.
Jules Cranwell
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