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SubhamNarwal
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cylinders witb a two-and-a-half-inch bore and a six-inch
stroke set side by side and over the rear axle. I made them
out of the exhaust pipe of a steam engine that I had bought.
They developed about four horsepower. The power was
transmitted from the motor to the countershaft by a belt
and from the countershaft to the rear wheel by a chain.
The car would hold two people, the seat being suspended
on posts and the body on elliptical springs. There were two
speeds—one of ten and the other of twenty miles per hour
—
obtained by shifting the belt, which was done by a clutch
lever in front of the driving seat. Thrown forward, the
lever put in the high speed; thrown back, the low speed;
with the lever upright the engine could run free. 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.