In 2003 I had a retirement job in an antique car restoration shop near my home in Georgia and was one of 3 guys who rebuilt the engine on a red 1920 (or 21, I can't remember) Marmon Model 34B Cloverleaf Roadster that I became very familiar with. That car looked very much like the one pictured in the photos above and is still in this area in a local collector's museum. (Maybe it's the same car.) The red roadster had 2-wheel brakes, but (who knows) 4-wheel brakes may have been a Marmon option. I think the mystery car closed car is indeed a Marmon 34B, as a couple of posters have said, but somehow the lines of the body seem to indicate that it is probably a late teens car rather than from the early '20s. Somehow the Cloverleaf Roadster's lines seem more modern (that is, a later year) than the mystery car's.
For those readers interested, the Marmon 34B motor I helped rebuild is very modern looking in many ways, but old fashioned in its construction. It's an overhead valve, 6 cylinder behemoth with a bore and stroke of 3 3/4 by 5 inches, making for, if I'm calculating correctly, 331 cubic inches. It has a cast aluminum valve cover, which gives it a striking appearance. The rocker arms are supported on studs, similar to a '55 Chevrolet V8. The crankcase is aluminum, the 2 cylinder blocks of 3 cylinders each are cast iron and the single head is steel. One of the motor's problems was that over the years the different expansion co-efficients of these 3 metals had distorted everything to the point that none of the surfaces between the 3 major components were parallel to each other. I spend two weeks on a milling machine correcting this and by some miracle actually succeeded. Next, after filling them with JB Weld, we had to re-machine some of the welch plug (sand casting plug) holes which had rusted out and have the enormous cylinder head re-machined on a planer. Thankfully, the babbitt bearings were fine, so we got new pistons, rings, wrist pins and a head gasket from Egge Machine and ground the valves to complete the major work. (We made all the other gaskets, including for the exhaust, ourselves.) A minor problem was that the carburetor is on the passenger's side and is controlled by a rod from the gas pedal that goes right through the block and is supported on bushings. The bushings had gone bad, causing oil to leak, so I made new bushings which were machined to accept modern oil seals. After the Marmon Club told us none exist, one of my colleagues, Don Wright, re-made the water pump with a hand-crafted impeller and then the Johnson updraft carburetor. We then put it all together and it runs fine. Lots of power, but who wants to go fast with 2-wheel brakes.
