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are good people.
We'll do anything we can do to help them on
their way," Perkis says. There are a couple,of theories from Wake and Holcombe about why we have such problems -- and they seem plausible. One is that nobody has tried to drive an 1899 this far in a long, long time and there is no owner's manual. So, Wake has to learn about the car's care and feeding on the roll, as problems develop. The second has to do with |
the restoration,
which was done by another museum long before
Jim Conant of Fairview Park bought the car
and donated it to the Crawford. Holcombe said
restorers sometimes do not precisely duplicate the
way cars were assembled, sometimes because
what they see may not make sense to them. So,
they make small changes. Old-time designers Holcombe has a genuine reverence for the people who built cars long ago and |
says they designed things the way they did for
a purpose. They
were sophisticated engineers
doing the best they could with the tools
and information they had. But a restorer may not understand that, and a tiny change could have a big impact. As a result, the 1899 might run just fine for a few miles - but ask it to go hundres of miles, and problems occur. It is also possible-- for whatever reason-- Shanks did not think readers were interested in mechanical |
problems and he did not report
on them. According to the articles reported
by Shanks the only mechanical problem they
had was the result of a crash . The crash was reported on May 24, 1899, next to a story noting that Queen Victoria was 80 years old. The headline for Shanks' article was, "A 'spill' on the way to Gotham," and the story was datelined Fairport, N.Y. Part of the story reads: "Two men shooting through the air and down an embankment; a horseless carriage "running wild |