F15Falcon

In Texas, you can use a vintage license plate that matches the year of your classic car or truck as long as you have two plates in good condition with the proper colors. You can register them as either Classic Car which requires you to re-new the plates every year, or as Antique plates which are pro-rated on a five year cycle. Registering them as antique plates only requires one plate on the car (even though you need both of them to be approved at the county tax office) and you do not need a vehicle inspection sticker anymore. As antique plates, you are supposed to only use the car for parades, car shows and club activities, but I have used them on a few of my vehicles for years and the police really have not bothered me when I use the cars for a regular drive around town.

I had a couple of pairs of plates that were in nice condition, but they had a few nicks and dings in them. The county tax office said that for the plates to be approved, that I had to touch them up. I decided to totally repaint them and this is the process that worked the best and looks awesome:

Here is the plate I started with:



Regular paint remover makes quick work of stripping the old paint off:



A wire brush gets all the old paint off:







Small dings can be worked out with a hammer and dolly. Filler may be needed on bigger dents. I used polyester primer to prime the plates:





We now need to paint the plate. The numbers and letters are white so I painted the whole plate white with catalyzed urethane:



When the paint is dry, I applied 5 coats of clear over the white:



When the clear was dry, I applied two coats of black basecoat over the clear:



The next thing to do is to very carefully sand through the black base coat to reveal the white numerals underneath. I use a sanding pad and 1200 grit sandpaper with lots of water:



Since we applied 5 coats of clear, there is no chance of sanding through to the white underneath. Start with one numeral at a time until the edges are as nice as you want them:









When all the numerals are to your liking, you can apply a couple of coats of clear over the whole thing. The clear will bring out the shine in the black and the white and protect the whole plate:

nba1341

Very nicely done thanks for the tips I will have to use these when restoring my california plate

rst08tierney

Very nice, though very time consuming. Great write up.

For someone lazy like my self I just bought a replica of my plate (california) they run any where from $55 to $80 bucks and the plate is in mint condition when all is said and done

http://www.licenseplates.tv/license-plates.html

(you can go with your current plate numbers to avoid the hassle at the dmv)

andrewmp6

If your careful you can use paint thinner on a rag to move the black.Or vaseline over the parts you want white paint.

tx65coupe

Thats cool. It looks fantastic. I run YOM plates on mine too.

CarGuyZM10

Very neat! Does anyone know what states you can use these in? (Like Pa?)

F15Falcon

That would work, but you would still need to get the plate approved, and most of the replicas I have seen are aluminum. Here in Texas they check them with a magnet to make sure they are steel. I could have started out with the plate that I had approved by the tax office, and got a reproduction made of my original, but have never been afraid of a little manual labor and I like to do things myself.

scootchu

Very cool!!! Great Job.

mr_velocity

Awesome. I was wondering why you were clearing the white before painting the black. Pretty neat trick.

PReal

Very nice! I have a set of 65 Texas plates that I will be using as well!

I beleive mine are black letters on white background from 1965.

Parker