makes no difference, that's just the way the factory did it those years, possibly to allow the oil that can bubble out of an overheated coil to drip on the ground instead of getting all over the coil mounting hardware
"When we tug a single thing in nature, we find it attached to the rest of the world" ~ John Muir "When we tug a single thing on an old truck, we find it falls off" ~ me Some TF series details & TF heater pics