READER’S STORY
ME AND MY RESTO
When Paul Collins found his DKW in a barn there was just one problem: it was in northern Sweden
Sometimes you just have an affinity with a marque... that happened with me and DKW. This was the final DKW model that the company made before it became Audi as we know it today and the engines went from two- to four-stroke. I’ve owned it for six years. It has a 1200cc three-cylinder two-stroke engine and I’ve just finished restoring it myself in my garage in Hull.
The car was advertised on a Swedish website called Blocket and was in Sweden, which is why it’s left-hand drive. It had been stored in a garage for ten years. I went with my Swedish friend Frederick Folkstan to pick it up and then I drove it carefully to Gothenburg. We put it on the ferry to Immingham, where I picked it up.
It needed quite a bit of bodywork, so I stripped it and I put the bare shell on a spit to do the welding, which helped. I also had to fabricate many body parts myself.
The interior was bad, really bad. I had to make the headlining and also re trimmed the seats myself. Everything inside was restored, the seats resembled something from the Addams Family, the cloth was so threadbare. I ended up having new cloth manufactured in America for the seat as I couldn’t find anything remotely near the original here. This took more than a year.
The door cards had discoloured badly due to the sun, so I recoloured all the vinyl using vinyl paint from Colorlock in the Midlands, which is a fantastic product. I also recarpeted the entire interior.
Luckily it isn’t as difficult to find parts as it used to be because the Dutch club have invested a lot of time buying parts from all over Europe and storing them in a warehouse.
I’ve restored quite a few DKWs over the years, so I knew where to get the bits. I was as organised and methodical as I had been in previous restorations and, thankfully, most of the work went to plan.
A dirty problem
The engine needed a complete rebuild as number three piston was missing the top ring and the pin that held the top ring had become loose and worked its way through the crown of the piston. In the process it had heavily scored the bore to the point that it was beyond a rebore.
I ended up having to get another block and pistons from Holland and also had the crank rebuilt. The only real nightmare occurred after it came back from the specialist. When I came to fit the crank a year later, one of the bearing faces wasn’t right, so I had to send it to Holland for another rebuild.
The first car I ever owned was a DKW. My father bought one secondhand, imported from Holland. They did sell it in the UK (the head office was in Brentford),
