Lou Metelko wrote
> There was never a factory installed radio in the 4A's. All radios were
> dealer installed so the speaker(s) could be anywhere. My original 4A
> (CTC64139) had a lone speaker mounted on the rear shelf.
Sorry, Lou - but with respect you're wrong! There were plenty of cars of all
models with
factory fitted radios, but few if any had radios fitted to them in which the
cars were
exported for sale in another country. This was primarily to avoid a flood of
marine
insurance claims for theft of radios in transit. Quite enough other stuff got
nicked as
well. In any one year, between three and four thousand cars were sold under the
UK
Personal Export Scheme in which the owner drove the car in UK or Europe before
final
shipment to the eventual destination market. The majority of those cars had
radios in them
and the factory approved units were only Smiths 'Radiomobile' AM receivers.
Cars going
into Europe were fitted with Medium and Long wave units (five pushbuttons),
North America
had Medium wave only (manual tune) and the Rest of the World had Medium/ Short
wave seven
band manual tune.
Cars sold in the US as new imports had a dealer fit radio. This was not a
factory shipped
item and mostly sourced from within the US. Mostly they were branded Triumph
and the
factory fitted units on the P.E. cars were clearly branded as Radiomobile.
Until about 1960/61, all factory fit radios had a separate valve (tube) pack on
the
scuttle with the tuner just ahead of the gear lever. Current consumption was
about 7 amps
with a one minute or so warm-up.
The TR4A loudspeaker location on factory fitted units was an oval speaker
mounted so that
it 'shouted' into either the driver or passenger footwell from its location on
the
transmission tunnel. TR6's often had a round speaker in a shallow square
housing screwed
in the centre of the fuel tank trim board aft of the seats
Jonmac
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