No, the flywheel on the left on a Deere a and b was the engine starting flywheel - There was no electric starter on them. Look closely at it and you'll see that the flywheel isn't wide enough to safely run a leather belt on it (something like 3" thick). This is a later model (around 1950) with the electric starter so they put an enclosure around the flywheel for safety so some farmer didn't get wrapped around it.
There was a big power take-off pulley on the other side that typically had the 6" wide belt running to an attachment out in front of the tractor nose. You can see it in this photo:
IIRC, the PTO pulley went through a gear-reduction to get it to run slightly slower than the engine (which never ran very fast in the first place). We didn't have Deere tractors on our farm (ours were all Fergusons) but there were plenty of old Deeres around the neighborhood and they could always out-pull a Ferguson in the tractor pulls. The Fergusons all had the PTO at the rear of the tractor and also drove a 6" wide belt. I have a cousin who inherited a couple of 1942 Ferguson tractors and is still using them, today! My dad had a 1946 Ferguson that was one of the first made after Ford went back to civilian production after WW II (Henry Ford bought the license to manufacture British Ferguson tractors here in the USA).
Wow..... A short trip down "Memory Lane"!
