KÜCHEN | Mid 1920s- mid 1950s | Germany :
Küchen was a maker of proprietary engines and, above all, the work of the designer Richard Küchen, whose units powered a long list of other firms’ motorcycles. The Küchen range included 348cc and 498cc three-valve overhead-camshaft engines made during the mid to late 1920s, and the same hands designed the horizontally opposed twin that powered the Hoffmann Gouverneur and the V35 twin used in the Victoria V35 Bergmeister, with Richard Küchen’s name attached to an extraordinary career and many iconic models. Because these were bought-in power units, the Küchen name appears across many marques of the period, including the makers you list, rather than on machines of its own.
Two of the post-war designs in your draft are well documented and worth setting out in detail. The Hoffmann Gouverneur, introduced in 1951, used a transversely mounted 248cc flat-twin four-stroke designed by Richard Küchen with shaft drive, and it was developed into the MP 250-2 and finally, in 1953, the 298cc S 300. The Victoria V35 Bergmeister, the firm’s first post-war four-stroke, was announced in 1951 but delayed for a couple of years by a long and expensive development, and Küchen gave it a transversely mounted V-twin, shaft final drive and an unusual four-speed transmission that used chains and sprockets rather than gears, an arrangement he had first employed at Zündapp in the early 1930s. In production form the Bergmeister was a 347cc V-twin of about 21 horsepower and 130 kilometres per hour, built from 1953 to 1955 in roughly 5,000 examples.
The chain-driven gearbox points to the deeper part of Küchen’s career, his long association with Zündapp. Before the war he had designed a shallow V-twin for Ardie that stayed a prototype, and his post-war run of clean-lined engines with hidden induction and concealed carburettors ran from the Zündapp 601, the green elephant whose origins lay in the K600 of around 1936, through the Hoffmann Gouverneur to the Victoria Bergmeister, all three of them using chain-driven gearboxes. His reputation was built on volume and breadth as much as on any single engine. He is credited with developing the Zündapp KS500, KS600 and the KS750 used by the Wehrmacht, a king-shaft engine for Tornax, the Victoria Bergmeister, a V8 racing engine for Hans Stuck, his three-valve 500 engine, the chain transmission and a driven sidecar, along with work at Triumph and DKW, and is described as having created more motorcycles and held more patents than any other German engineer. That last claim comes from a dealer’s description rather than a scholarly source, so it is best treated as a reflection of his standing rather than a measured fact, and the V8 for Hans Stuck sits in the same lightly sourced category.
