When you use an early Triumph 350 twin as a commuter hack day in day out, year after year, you come to have a rather different perspective on the marque than the classic, clean it and show it, brigade. Not that I am against them, at least they stop British bikes disappearing altogether. I bought my 3TA in the mid seventies when prices of British bikes were yet to reach the absurd levels of the eighties - because the Triumph was a bit of a rat even then with lots of different bits from different models I only paid £75!
The 3TA is not a fast bike, its performance is on a par with a good Honda CD175. The mild state of tune does mean that the chassis does not suffer from the mind numbing vibes of, say, a 750 Bonnie. In fact, the 350 will vibrate harshly when things inside the engine start to go wrong, so there’s advance warning of imminent demise; very useful.
Unfortunately, not knowing any better when I bought mine, the vibes were already there and it was only a question of a couple of hundred miles before I had to do a complete rebuild - they seem to average one every two years (about 26000 miles).
Handling is also pretty much like a good Honda CD175. Even with the suspension sorted there is quite a bit of wallowing in the faster corners (if 70mph can be considered fast, these days). The bike originally came with a tiny half width SLS front brake, off, I think, an early Tiger Cub. That lack of braking combined with the chassis meant I fell off the bike several times before I learnt to slow down way before the bends. With a TLS drum fitted, the machine was a thousand times safer, but you could feel the braking forces trying to twist the forks in half.
I did have part of the rear subframe snap on me, which I put down to the great mileage and the fact the bike had to carry my twenty stone every day - a mate welded up the snapped frame and added some additional bracing that made it look more like part of the Forth Bridge than a piece of a motorcycle. Needless to say, it hasn’t given any trouble since. I have never actually torn everything off the frame to do a respray and there is still a lot of the original paint left - it was applied to a much higher standard in the old days.
I was tempted to have him weld a few more tubes into the main frame, but the complex stresses involved could quite easily have ended up snapping the structure.
The bike is adequate for town work just so long as you don't spend too much time with the clutch pulled in - drag is endemic and the machine slowly creeps forward after half a minute and then stalls when you try to stop it by using the brakes.
Starting is, er, interesting. As in totally unpredictable. Sometimes a hot engine refuses to fire and the long line of irate motorists go berserk - however, when they see it’s an old Brit they quieten down a bit, and on a few occasions have been willing to emerge from their cages to give us a push.
Similarly, the police tend to look the other way over minor transgressions, figuring, I suppose, that I have got enough troubles just keeping the Triumph running. When the front brake cable snapped, forcing me to roar through a set of red lights, the cop who pulled me over rather than book me spent fifteen minutes reminiscing on his days as a bike cop, telling hair raising tales of Commandos that fell to pieces under him.
Another reasonable aspect of the 350 has been consumable longevity. Chains, brake shoes and even the tyres seem to last for years. I have been caught out once by buying a really cheapo Taiwanese drive chain, it wore so fast that every time I stopped the bike I had to adjust the chain tension. The rear mudguard and huge front guard keep most of the crud off the rider and bike, although the chrome wheels are now matt black and rust.
I went through a phase when I fitted a huge handlebar fairing. The wind drag and wobbles effectively reduced top speed to 50mph, but I rode through the winter somewhat majestically, with, for the first time in living memory, warm fingers. Come the spring it was back to the naked bike because I couldn’t stand being the bane of motorists on A roads. I managed to lose the fairing’s brackets after that and haven’t got around to making up some replacements, so subsequent winters were cold finger jobs.
Running the bike on snow and ice is surprisingly easy, a time when its exceptionally mild power delivery wins out. I have never had to stop riding the bike, it shrugs through even the most horrendous conditions, although occasionally the water gets to the electrics and I limp into work on one cylinder. Once or twice, I have had to push the bike a mile or two until the electrics decided to dry out.
With a flat out, engine wrecking top speed of 80mph the Triumph was not much use on the motorway. Much better to suss the contented growl of the vertical twin engine at, say, 65mph, down the better B or smaller A roads. There was a slight temptation to rev the engine hard in lower gears as there was little by way of torque, but this lack of grunt was consistent throughout the rev range; ergo, there was little point revving the balls off it.
The 350 can be used from about 35mph up in top (fourth) gear which is just as well as the gearchange has always been heavy going, although it never actually slips out of gear it requires a shoe wrecking, toe crunching stamp to effect its ever so slow change. In town I prefer to dump the engine in second and forget about the gearbox until I need to find neutral, a finicky business at the best of times and impossible whilst at a standstill.
Other transmission problems were caused by a bad batch of rear wheel bearings - I went through three sets until I found one that lasted the normal 50000 plus miles. The others were shagged out in hundreds rather than thousands of miles, turning the handling really nasty, the back end having the kind of shakes that made you think the whole wheel was breaking up. They also caused the rear, expensive sprocket to wear at an alarming rate due to chronic misalignment. You have to be very careful buying parts for Triumphs because some of the pattern stuff is real rubbish.
The Triumph is not the type of reliable workhorse that you can neglect with impunity, it is now too old in years and high in mileage to expect that. It just about manages the daily 50 mile round trip to work and back without breaking down. Once home I have to run over all the bolts to see what has come loose. Clean off the oil that has leaked out of the pushrod tubes, check the tappets and primary chain and make sure the cruddy points haven’t fallen off again. The electrics are especially intolerant of neglect, wires tending to fall out of regulators causing generators to go up in smoke - the bike has set fire to itself a couple of times and I had to sacrifice my leather jacket to save the machine.
The engine rebuilds usually consist of new pistons and rebore, primary chain and sprockets, clutch assembly, rockers and pushrods. The crankshaft, despite small bearings lasts for about three rebuilds, the camshafts even longer, whilst the gearbox is still on mostly original components. It is possible to convert to 5TA spec but the extra 150cc tends, in my opinion, to accentuate the problems that the 350 engine suffers, so I have resisted the urge for more power.
The Triumph could do with it, though. It's a bit sick making to have some spotty youth on a derestricted (at least I assume they are the 22hp versions) TZR125 make mincemeat out of the venerable Brit - there should be a law against that kind of thing. On the plus side, even a worn engine does 70mpg, as much as 80mpg possible when the motor’s in good shape. Oil consumption works out at about 100 miles per pint, enough to treat the system as total loss and not bother doing regular oil changes - most of that oil leaks out of the engine in typical ancient British manner.
A nice, original spec 3TA will fetch around two grand, my rat would probably fetch £750 to £1000. Overall, I like riding the 3TA but have got to the stage where I rarely use it for weekend work, it's just too unpredictable to take for any great distance.
Anon