[TR] build date of TR3A

TeriAnn Wakeman twakeman at razzolink.com
Wed Oct 24 07:34:46 MDT 2007


DLylis at aol.com wrote:
> Dave,
> Mine (and others) is the other way.  The title says it is a year  before the 
> car was built.  My number is TS74461 which puts it closer to the  end of the 
> run for 60s yet it was titled as a 59.  Others have found the  same phenomenon.


That's strange, to be titled the year before it was built.  Perhaps it 
was swept into a temporal anomaly and appeared on a dealer's lot the 
year before the factory built it?  Or perhaps sometime in the past the 
pink slip was lost and the owner just took a guess at the year when he 
had a DMV issue a new title?

It is common to see a TR3 titled for a year and occasionally two years 
after the build date.  My TR3 was built in May of 1960 and titled as a 
1961.  It was evidently common for cars to take several months to go 
from the UK assembly line to the US dealers floor.  And if there were no 
obvious model year changes, a car sitting on the dealer floor from one 
model year to the next would get sold as the latest model year.

Strange things happen all the time.  I know one small mouth TR3 that 
started life as an engine in a Triumph wrecking yard.  The TR was 
assembled out of parts from several triumphs.  The owner of the wrecking 
yard tried to do a first rate build (The vehicle won a people's choice 
trophy on its first outing).  He got a new commission plate and stamped 
it with the engine number so that the vehicle would appear to be all 
original with all matching numbers then got it registered at DMV as an 
original vehicle that had been unregistered long enough to fall off the 
DMV computers.

So somewhere there is a small mouth TR3 with matching engine and 
commission numbers registered as the year it appeared to be.   Strange 
things happen over the years.  Stranger yet, it may be the only TR3 in 
the world that has a commission number ending in "E".

TeriAnn


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