To start the car it was necessary to turn the motor over by hand with
the clutch free. To stop the car one simply released the clutch and
applied the foot brake. There was no reverse, and speeds other than
those of the belt were obtained by the throttle. I bought the iron work
for the frame of the carriage and also the seat and the springs. The
wheels were twenty-eight-inch wire bicycle wheels with rubber tires. The
balance wheel I had cast from a pattern that I made and all of the more
delicate mechanism I made myself. One of the features that I discovered
necessary was a compensating gear that permitted the same power to be
applied to each of the rear wheels when turning corners. The machine
altogether weighed about five hundred pounds. A tank under the seat held
three gallons of gasoline which was fed to the motor through a small
pipe and a mixing valve. The ignition was by electric spark. The
original machine was air-cooled--or to be more accurate, the motor
simply was not cooled at all. I found that on a run of an hour or more
the motor heated up, and so I very shortly put a water jacket around the
cylinders and piped it to a tank in the rear of the car over the
cylinders.
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