DAN'S PAPERS, June 8, 2007 Page 26
Triumph
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TR-3. It had a five speed standard shift with four forward speeds and one reverse. It was not particularly fast, but it was cool-looking and reliable for its time. The engineers decided NOT to design a new engine for it. Instead, they bought reliable, four-cylinder farm tractor engines from a factory that made them and modified them to fit under the hood. My original one is still there, still working. They made this model of TR-3 until 1961. All together, they made about 20,000 of them. Air conditioning in the car is provided by a metal lever that pushes open a vent on the hood directly in front of the windshield. With the vent closed, the air whooshed around the sides of the car. With the vent opened, it came
down into the cockpit as a brisk wind to cool you off. Of course, no matter what you did you were out in the open air. The car does have a soft leather top that you can push up and down like you’d push a sunbonnet on a baby carriage. It has snaps that you click onto the top of the windshield to keep it up there. But it really isn’t effective in keeping the rain out. Yes, there is heat. It is a metal box on the floor above the foot pedals that has a fan in it. It has two modes, operated by the twist knob on the dashboard. If you turned it ON and it got too hot, you turned it OFF. I was wrong when I said the car only has a leather top. It has a hard top, shaped like a hard top, that you can set on top of the open
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cockpit, with the leather top down, and attach with latches. The front latches of the hard top go on the top of the windshield. The back ones go on the rear fenders. If you hit a big bump, which I did in June of 1981 in Southampton while going 20-miles-per-hour instead of 5miles-an-hour, it flies off and lands in the road, scaring the hell out of you and everybody else, particularly those behind you. This top, today, is resting in the roof rafters in my garage. It has gouges in it from hitting the road. It has been up there since that day in June of 1981. All the gauges set in the dashboard have white needles behind glass that point to things. The big gauges indicate the car’s speed in miles-per-hour and the engine’s revolutions per minute. Smaller gauges indicate the engine’s temperature, whether the battery is charging or discharging, the water temperature in the radiator and the level of fuel in the gas tank. There are also two buttons. One is called STARTER. You press it and it causes the car’s starter motor to turn over. The other button says CHOKE and it’s a pull button. When you pull it out, it increases the amount of gasoline that comes to the spark plugs. You need to choke the gas to get an excessive amount to the spark plugs in order to get it to fire and first start up. After it runs for a while, it warms up and doesn’t need all that gas. It starts to run rough with the choke on. So you push in the choke. It smoothes out. It sounds like a single engine airplane. The other items on the dashboard are twists. One operates the heater, ON and OFF. The other operates the windshield wiper, ON or OFF. That’s about it for the luxury items in this car. There are rearview mirrors on the front fenders that are fully adjustable if somebody gets out of the car and goes up there and twists them until you say THAT’S IT, they’re aimed right. Oh, and it does have one other luxury, which I think they had in the 1959 version for the first time — blinking turn signals. There was a lever atop the center stalk of the steering wheel, right above the horn, that you could push sideways and the blinking light in back would turn on that side. After you turned, while you were straightening the wheel, something inside the center stalk would pass a certain raised metal point and the turn signal would snap back to its central position, thereby automatically turning the blinking light off ALL BY ITSELF. Wow! That feature, by the way, stopped working on my car around 1991. You push the turn signal and it does make the turn signal blink, but after the turn you have to remember to push it back. I should say that another luxury feature on the dashboard is a single blinking light to indicate that the blinking turn taillight is on, to remind you to turn it off. The car has no safety features whatsoever. The rear seat is a wooden plank with a leather and cotton affair attached atop it. Only one person can sit back (continued on page 37)