I had the smaller version of that Montgomery-Ward (MW) tractor. It had the 1.5 hp Clinton. Rope start using rope that you wound around the starter pulley, then allowed the rope to snap you in the face as you pulled it for starting. I was probably 12 yrs old when I first started using the "hot-rod" as follows:

Ours was a retired garden tractor. It had the knobby tires with ratcheting hub differential, like a manure spreader had. My uncle & I modified it for just personal transportation. We built our own sulky, as it didn't have one before. It was used as a walk-behind tractor before. But, our sulky didn't have the luxury of the "spring" I see under your seat. That would've been nice. We just welded 2 pipes to the small side-delivery rake wobble wheels to make the sulky seat supports. Then I learned about overriding the governor for more speed and using different pulley combos to get desired speed. Our MW only had one gear. It was just direct drive with a belt-tightening clutch lever.

But...then I learned what can happen when constantly using max rpm with the splash system oiler. Seems the rod stretched a bit and that didn't go well with the rest of the engine. One thing I forgot to add, the 1.5 hp Clinton was borrowed from our "man-killer" push-powered Roof weed cutter. I'd unbolt it from the weed cutter when we weren't using it to put on my "hot-rod" MW unit. The weed cutter was used a lot in the summer to mow under the bottom wire of barbed wire fences & around telephone poles. It didn't go real well when I lunched (now known as "grenading") the Clinton, as it needed to go back on the weed cutter. So, we travelled to a farm store & got a NEW B&S 4 hp!!! Wow....what a power upgrade! So, I went thru the same remove/replace process again between the hot-rod & the Roof weed cutter. But this time I had enough hp to leave the governor alone and still spin a bigger speed pulley. I could go full throttle, pull the clutch & "smoke" the tires on a concrete floor!! One time I also cracked the main bull-gear in half doing a burn-out. We took it to a neighbor that was good at oxy-acet brazing. We heated the gear while he brazed it back together. It worked perfectly afterwards and lasted for years afterwards. New parts weren't an option.

The hot rod stayed with me until I got my drivers license in '64. Other than the 2nd engine, almost nothing was store-bought. Of course, it had a straight pipe made of 1/2" pipe fittings. It was neat to run at night with the fire flying out of it. The Roof weed cutter also lasted many years afterwards. I was happy to see the Roof go away, but not the "hot rod".