"C Clark remove nospam" wrote in message
m...
On 5/3/2011 8:34 PM, Ed Huntress wrote:
"Pete S" wrote in message
.. .
I went googling for simple motor cart designs and couldn't find any as
basic as the ones we built 'way back when. So I put up a page about our
kind of first motor vehicle. It is he

http://www.spaco.org/MotorCart/MotorCart.htm

Pete Stanaitis
---------------

Did you ever see the Briggs & Stratton Flyer buckboard? (ca. 1920) There
was
one in the Harrah collection, which has been broken up. I don't know
where
it is now.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jacksnell707/3097927611/


It's at the National Automobile Museum (Harrah Collection) in Reno, NV.

A fun visit, especially if you have a docent along telling you the whole
story. A shadow of the pre-selloff Harrah Collection that knocked me
out as a kid, but it is still great.

Peterson Museum in LA is fun too. They fired up a racecar inside the 3rd
or 4th floor when I was there and drove it out of the building. Brain
splitting sound and the smell of partially burned hydrocarbons added to
the museum experience.

-C

I'm always sorry I didn't see the Harrah collection in its heyday. There
were a lot of cars in it that I would like to have seen. I have Ken Purdy's
coffee-table book of photos and narratives taken from the collection, and
it's magnificent.

A metalworking aside: The Bugatti Royale in Harrah's collection, at the time
considered to be the most valuable historic automobile in the world, had a
cracked block. So they brought in a guy from Italy who supposedly was the
world's premier welder of cast iron.

He welded it back up with O/A and a cast-iron filler rod. The engine was
fired up and run after that, to prove that it could, and then it was shut
down, never to be run again.

Still, back in the late '60s or early '70s, the estimated value of the car
was $6 million. Harrah was offered more for it but he wouldn't sell.

--
Ed Huntress