KOFA | 1923-25 | Germany :
The Kofa was a Nuremberg motorcycle of the early 1920s, produced by Kofa AG at Neutorstraße 10 in the city, from 1923 to 1925. The machines were powered by 289cc single-cylinder two-stroke engines. No further detail on the proprietors, the design of the frame or the commercial fate of the company is on record beyond the single entry in Tragatsch.
What the Kofa’s address and dates do establish is context. Nuremberg in the early 1920s was one of the more active centres of the German motorcycle industry, home to a cluster of small manufacturers that included ENAG at Erle & Nestler’s machine works, MJS at Schönfeld & Schwarz, Ziejanü at Untere Kanalstraße, Zwerg at Plärrer, and RUT at Gernet’s motorfahrzeug works. The Nuremberg region also housed the longer-established Victoria, which had been building motorcycles since before the First World War and which provided a model of what sustained production could look like. The smaller firms that appeared around it in the early 1920s, of which Kofa was one, were almost all short-lived.
The 289cc displacement chosen for the Kofa’s own two-stroke engine was slightly larger than the most common German lightweight capacity classes of the period, which tended to cluster around 142cc to 175cc at the entry level and 246cc to 269cc in the next tier. A 289cc engine placed the Kofa in a useful middle position, offering more power than the smallest machines without competing directly on displacement with the larger singles from the established proprietary engine suppliers. Whether this was a deliberate market positioning or simply a function of the bore and stroke the designer chose is not recorded.
The corporate designation AG, Aktiengesellschaft, indicates that Kofa was constituted as a joint stock company rather than the partnership or sole proprietorship more typical of the very smallest German assemblers of this era. This suggests at least a degree of formal capitalisation at founding, though the hyperinflation of 1923 eroded the real value of such capital almost immediately, and the years 1923 to 1925 were precisely those in which many formally organised German motorcycle ventures found their initial resources worth a fraction of their nominal value by the time trading conditions stabilised.
