My curiosity has gotten the best of me and I would like to poll all the TR3A
owners on the list.
Questions:
1. Is the center of your front apron above the grill smoothly rounded or is
there an "upper lip" just above the grill
2. How certain are you that this is the original front apron?
3. What is your commision number?
Over the years I have been listening to people arguing about the TR3A front
apron. Some say its supposed to be smoothly rounded down to the grill and those
that aren't have been damaged. Others say there is an "upper lip" and the ones
that are rounded are bondoed.
The front apron on my car is smoothly rounded. I'm virtually certain that its
the original for the car, has never been damaged and not bondoed. While looking
at other TR3s last weekend, I saw both types and noticed that the older cars had
the "upper lip" and the newer ones had smooth rounded apron noses.
My working theory is that the original front valance tool had the "upper lip".
It broke or got worn out somewhere in the production run and was replaced by
another tool. They built a tool with a single simple curve because it was
cheaper than a compound curve. I think that this tool change was never
documented because it was the same part number.
>From my small sampling of 6 or 7 TR3s it looks like the changeover happened
somewhere around TS64000. Unfortunatly, I have no way of knowing if any of the
front aprons had been swaped out at some time. Who knows maybe the apron change
was an undocumented part of the TS60000 changes?
So I'm taking a larger sampling with this poll.
Data point: TS75519 came with a smoothly rounded front apron.
TeriAnn
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