Baudouin Brand Guidelines: The 1918 Marseille Marine Engine Maker Owned by Weichai

A Marseille family, a canoe and a 1918 company.

Moteurs Baudouin grew out of a Marseille family of founders. French Wikipedia, citing the local paper Le Méridional in 1995, describes a Baudouin bell foundry that was already well known in the city in the 19th century; the company says the foundry cast everything from church bells to small clock movements. One of the family, Charles Baudouin, son of Eugène, turned to engines: French Wikipedia says he began building small 5 hp petrol engines for friends from 1902, and both it and the company recount a 1904 crossing from Toulon to the coast of Algeria in a small boat driven by one of his engines. His brother Richard ran the Pharo shipyard in Marseille, the company says.

The company itself dates from 1918. French Wikipedia says that on 12 September 1918 Léopold and Jean Isnard, with a few friends, created the Société des Moteurs Baudouin (SMB) and made the family house on the boulevard Rabatau its first workshop. From 1922 to 1963 every engine was designed by the engineer Antonin Pouillot, according to both French Wikipedia and the company, which credits him with the “simple and robust” approach it still claims today.

The first engines were petrol units built to order for fishermen and pleasure boats, named by a letter and the number of cylinders: A1, B2, E4 and so on. In 1922 the company launched what it calls its first range, the O, T, Y and Z, from 3 to 60 hp. French Wikipedia says that by the end of the 1920s SMB engines were fitted in more than 3,000 boats, with 36 agents in France and agencies in Paris, Nantes, Port-Louis, Bordeaux and Algiers.

Around 1929–1930 the firm turned to diesel, building new workshops in the Timone district that opened in 1931, French Wikipedia says. The first diesel, the two-cylinder DA2, was followed by the DB, the “Diesel Baudouin,” with individual cylinder heads; the company says it ran at 750 rpm and stayed in production for 27 years. Totals differ: the company gives more than 13,000 DB engines, French Wikipedia more than 18,000. In the summer of 1936 the painter and sailor Marin-Marie crossed the Atlantic alone under power in 17 days in the motor boat Arielle, which French Wikipedia says carried a four-cylinder 90 hp Baudouin.

The sources used for this guide do not say how Moteurs Baudouin operated during the occupation of 1940–1944.

DK, Saint-Loup and a run of owners.

After the war came the slow DG, which the company says sold poorly because of its weight, and the V8 and V12 GV. French Wikipedia says a GV8 served as the emergency generating set at the Eiffel Tower’s power plant, and that SMB employed 230 to 240 people in 1946–1947. In 1948 it set up a marine applications department to supply the whole propulsion line — engine, reduction gear, shaft and propeller. The DK of 1949, with a 140 mm bore and 40 to 150 hp, is the range the company calls the most famous in its history; French Wikipedia puts output of the DK and its DNK sibling at about 70,000 units up to 1972.

Growth meant new sites. French Wikipedia says a 55,000-square-metre site in Marseille’s Saint-Loup district was authorised in April 1958 and occupied from 1959. The DV and DVX ranges followed, and in 1965 the first turbocharged series was named DP, the P honouring Pouillot. By the late 1960s, French Wikipedia says, marine work made up 55 per cent of production and industrial machines such as road rollers the rest.

The 1970s brought outside owners. French Wikipedia says employees learned in September 1974 that the plant would join Britain’s General Electric Company (GEC), alongside Dorman, Kelvin, Paxman and Ruston, effective January 1975. Partnerships with John Deere, on the D106 series of 1983, and Renault Véhicules Industriels, on the R series, added smaller engines but ended, the company says, when the partners began targeting the marine market themselves. In the 1980s Baudouin entered powerboat racing with its BTI engines — French Wikipedia records two podium places in the 1989 offshore Formula 1 season — and on 14 December 1987 it was sold to Maneurop, part of the Paribas group.

The 1990s and 2000s were unsettled. French Wikipedia says ASD Industries became majority shareholder on 18 July 1991, the year the six-, eight- and twelve-cylinder M26 range appeared, and that Axa Private Equity became majority shareholder in 2005. In April 2008 the company left Marseille for a business park in Cassis; at the end of that year Moteurs Baudouin SA entered court-supervised receivership (redressement judiciaire).

Design and documentation.

Marine engine makers sell to shipyards, shipowners and ship managers rather than to the public, and their websites read like technical catalogues. The core of most is an engine range sorted by bore and output. WinGD names its two-stroke engines by cylinder bore in centimetres, from the X52 to the X92, while Everllence gives its four-stroke engines bore-and-stroke numbers such as 32/44 and 49/60. Letters added to those numbers mark the fuel, the generation or the version.

The pictures follow the product. These companies publish cutaway renderings that open an engine to show its cylinders, pistons and crankshaft, alongside photographs of finished engines on test beds and in engine rooms. Model names, cylinder counts and output figures sit beside the images, so a page often reads more like a data sheet than an advertisement.

Fuel has become one of the main ways these makers describe themselves. Their websites sort engines by fuel type as well as by vessel type, with pages for liquefied natural gas, methanol, ammonia and LPG; WinGD adds ethanol, and Everllence marks its alternative-fuel two-stroke engines with a suffix for each fuel. Dual-fuel engines, which run on gas or on liquid fuel, are presented through type designations and technical descriptions in the companies’ own terms.

Two other features recur. Service network maps and location finders show where parts and field engineers can be found; Everllence speaks of more than 140 service locations, and WinGD runs a lifecycle-support arm under its own name. Heritage timelines, meanwhile, tie current engines to Rudolf Diesel, whose engine was developed with MAN in Augsburg in the 1890s and licensed to Sulzer in Winterthur, giving the oldest names in the field more than a century of dates to show.

Cassis, M33 and PowerKit.

The rescue came from China. On 23 January 2009, French Wikipedia says, the company was bought by Weichai Power, the diesel-engine maker based in Weifang; the company’s own history gives January 2009 and says its factory stayed open, Weichai opened a research and development centre at Cassis, and production and staffing in France grew. French Wikipedia adds that Weichai kept all the staff and started recruiting.

New ranges followed. In 2010 came the M26.2 and the W series, Weichai-based engines marinised at Cassis, according to French Wikipedia; the common-rail M26.3 arrived in 2016 and the M33, in six and twelve cylinders, in 2017, when Baudouin also returned to power generation with its PowerKit range. Its current marine propulsion list runs from the 6W105M at 136 kW to the 12M55 at up to 2,536 kW.

Today the company describes itself as offering propulsion and auxiliary engines, generator sets and variable-speed engines for marine, off-highway and power-generation uses. It names its global headquarters as Cassis, with a 17,000-square-metre site and about 220 employees there, and lists further sites in Pune, India, and Weifang, China, and an office in Chicago; it says it is present in more than 100 countries with over 300 service points, and that 125,000 engines have been produced. Its marine pages cover tugboats, workboats, fishing boats and yachts.

For a design guide, Baudouin shows how a brand can keep a founding family’s name and its “simple and robust” line through a century of owners. Compare Weichai, its owner since 2009, and Volvo Penta, another marine engine name. For this guide we use a harbour blue, a warm white and a bell bronze with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Baudouin’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.