Homemade Tractor Has One Wheel (Jan, 1933)

Homemade Tractor Has One Wheel

WITH a power plant that is suspended securely inside of a big ring-shaped wheel, a garden tractor has been built largely from odds and ends by R. D. Read of Akron, Ohio. It operates like the unicycle automobile developed in England. (P.S.M. May, ‘32, p. 63.) A single-cylinder motorcycle engine was used without modification except for the installation of an additional gear for cranking, and a planetary type clutch operated from the plow handle. The wheel is of sheet steel. T-shaped lugs stud its outside surface to give the tractor a firm grip. Around the center of its inside surface is a steel ring of square cross-section, having steel pins running through it to form a rack in which the teeth of a straddle gear engage. This gear is driven by a chain from the planetary clutch. Each handle of the plow-tractor is hollow, being made from channel-iron stock. One handle carries gasoline and the other oil. Controls are near each handle grip. To a coupling at the rear practically any farm tool can be attached. The tractor with a four horsepower motor, will run for eight hours, as fast as a man can walk, on a gallon of gasoline.