Steudel works

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Steudel-Werke
motorcycle and bicycle factory Horst Steudel
legal form Company with limited liability
founding 1895
resolution 1946
Reason for dissolution Transfer to public property on the basis of the referendum in Saxony on June 30, 1946
Seat Kamenz , Germany
management
  • Horst Steudel
  • Arno Steudel
Branch Bicycle manufacturers , automobile manufacturers , engine manufacturers

The Steudel-Werke were a German manufacturer of automobiles and engines based on Auenstrasse in Kamenz .

Company history

Founded in 1895 by Horst Steudel (1872–1959), initially as a workshop for repairing and later building new bicycles of the Saturn brand , from 1904 they produced a voiturette with a single-cylinder engine from De Dion-Bouton . A number of other automobiles with built-in engines from Fafnir (including the omnimobile ) and Aster were built up to 1907. For example, a 16-hp sports car can still be seen today in the Dresden Transport Museum . By 1911, eleven automobiles had been handcrafted, with three journeymen and three apprentices at Pulsnitzer Strasse 18 in Kamenz.

From 1907 until the end of the 1920s, Steudel also produced numerous built-in engines for other vehicle manufacturers. Customers were e.g. B. the small car manufacturers Club , DKW , Hataz , Hildebrand , Kenter , Komet , Lindner , Lipsia , Minimus , Möck , Omikron , Schuricht and Wittekind , but from 1926 also the Apoldaer Apollo-Werke AG . In 1919 the company founder acquired a large piece of land on Auenstrasse in Kamenz, on which a factory building for the motorcycle and bicycle factory Horst Steudel was built. From 1920 bicycles with a single-cylinder auxiliary engine were also produced, which were sold very well and exported to Japan. Small engines up to 2.5 hp were also produced as outboard engines for folding boats and other small watercraft. In the years that followed, water-cooled gasoline engines with 12, 16, 26 and 36 hp were manufactured as drives for land and water vehicles and delivered to 20 automobile factories.

The 4-cylinder V-engine that Steudel originally designed for heavy motorcycles and which worked on the two-stroke principle was particularly successful. Each of the two cylinder blocks at an angle of 90 ° to one another, each with two cylinders, was equipped with a double-acting charge pump. This engine developed 25 HP and was installed in large numbers in the DKW 4 = 8 type P25 (from 1929). In the period up to 1940, engines of this type with outputs from 22 to 32 hp were installed in a further eight DKW types (more than 8,000 units in total).

In 1940, Horst Steudel handed over the sole management of the company to his son Arno Steudel (1907–1981), who studied mechanical engineering at the Academy of Technology in Chemnitz and then at the TH Dresden , and the TH degree in 1932 with the Degree Dipl.-Ing. had completed. He then joined his father's company, where he had already worked as an intern for a year before studying. Arno Steudel designed the company's first diesel engines, which proved to be very successful and were also exported, including as ship propulsion systems. At that time the number of employees had grown to 80, plus several apprentices. In the summer of 1945, the Steudel engine works were dismantled on the orders of the Soviet occupying forces and the machines were shipped to the Soviet Union. The end came in 1946, when the company was declared public property, i.e. H. was expropriated without compensation on the basis of the referendum in Saxony on June 30, 1946 .

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