KSB  |  1924-29  |  Germany  :

KSB was one of the many small German assemblers that appeared during the motorcycle boom of the mid-1920s and lasted only a few years. From 1924 to 1929 the firm built a variety of machines using engines from DKW in 142cc and 175cc, Kühne in 348cc overhead-valve form, Blackburne, and JAP in 248cc and 490cc, the last of these in both overhead-valve and side-valve configurations. That engine roster, which is the whole of what your draft sets out, is also effectively the whole of what the standard reference records about the marque.

The list itself tells the real story of the firm’s character. Like dozens of contemporaries such as Eber, Mafa and Wels, KSB did not make its own engines but bought in proprietary units and built frames around them, using the small DKW two-strokes for its lightweights and the larger four-stroke singles from Kühne of Germany and from the British makers Blackburne and JAP for its more powerful touring and sporting models. This was the ordinary pattern of the German industry in those years, when a great many such names rose and fell within the span of the decade as the unstable economy of the Weimar period squeezed out the undercapitalised firms.