The Tradition 3CB's color scheme is awesome! I didn't know that Kirby made 2 different nozzles for it. Here are the letter codes of its serial numbers: F= July 1979 - February 1980 G= March 1980 - February 1981 H= March - August 1981 Tradition customers had a choice between a disposable bag system and the conventional one. The former had zippers on the outer bag, and the latter ones didn't.

I know Freeport. There is a big outlet shopping place there.

Picked one of these up for free the other day. Ordered bags and a new belt. How do you get the cloth bag off? I’ve had a quick look but it wouldn’t budge!

There's no way that's from 1979, unless it's been heavily modified. The Tradition did come out in 1979, but all '79 models had a Headlight cap locking switch on the side of the headlight, they also had metal fans, and I suspect yours has a Lexan fan. The safety switch on the '79 models were located on top of the interior of the headlight cap, the floor nozzles had a little metal pin on top in order to activate the switch, but this proved problematic. The Headlight locking switch models didn't last very long due to people breaking them, what the switch did was it locked the headlight cap in place meaning you had to slide the switch in order to lift the headlight cap, and slide it down again in order to lower the cap, but it was often broken by people trying to lower the cap with the switch on, which broke the mechanism. Kirby had to recall some models in order to swap over the cap/safety switch assembly to an updated one, as used previously on the Classic III and Classic Omega. Your Tradition is either from 1980 or 1980.