OK, after having the thing for nearly 2 months, I finally . . . on the very last day my old one was valid . . . got out a supply of screwdrivers, went outside, and put the new license plate on my car.
Now I’m flummoxed.
What do you do with the old one?
The new one arrived in the mail with no instructions other than a firm exhortation to keep the registration with the vehicle when operating it. That part I had a handle on already.
This isn’t the sort of thing you’d want to screw up. If you can screw it up. Can you?
It’s a metal plate, by the way. With light-reflective stuff. And hologram things. The edges seem very sharp.
Absolutely! You must now purchase a garage for displaying your old license plates on. Old and beat up is considered de riguer by some, but really, as long as it’s big enough that it might have held your car at one point or other is the only real qualification your garage needs. Once the garage has been purchased and installed, you must determine where to hang the first plate. Some like a sequential display, starting at the upper left corner of the left wall. Others think a more random (haphazard) display is more becoming. But it’s really up to you. It is an opportunity for you to make a very personal statement on your very own garage wall about your past license plates.
Frankly, I’m surprised your state is still throwing money away on new plates. Here you get the plate for the life of the vehicle (or beyond), with just a stick-on tag in the corner that must be replaced.
In recent years, I’ve just gotten the sticker, deej. I was surprised this time to get a whole plate. They seem to have upgraded the design. Went from one orange to two . . . with blossoms. Very nice.
It is important to get rid of a license plate in such a way that no one can get to it and use it. I once disposed of an old license plate in a dumpster at a veterinarian clinic. It was in the middle of a dumpster parfait of trash, dog crap, kitty toes, surgery detritus, cat litter, hypodermics and other assorted and generally unsavory items. And yet someone dove in there, hauled it out, put it on a car and got a parking ticket with it. Yes, it caused problems, but thankfully for gonzo’s budget, the make and model of car on the ticket did not match mine.
Fortunately, license plates break apart pretty easily. Hold on to both ends with towels or pot holders or cat-fighting gloves or some kind of protection and bend it in half. You can do it. Fold it all the way over, then bend it back the other way. Now bend it back and forth repeatedly, and eventually it will snap into half. Voila! as they say in sunny Espana – you now have two license plate halves, which can be disposed of in a number of creative and interesting ways.
Put a piece in a dumpster at a mall.
Take a piece to a military base and donate it to the military’s scrap drive. The army is currently collecting license plates and melting them down to make armor for HumVees.
Nail a piece to the door of a church. Martin Luther King is believed to have disposed of 95 pieces in this manner.
Drop a piece in the collection plate.
Drop a piece in the trash can in the McDonald’s drive through. If they ask if you want to order anything, tell them “No, thank you. I’m just practicing for when I’m really hungry.”
Put one piece in the trash this week; put the other piece in the trash sometime around Christmas.
Take it to Walmart and ask someone in the key department to dispose of it for you.
I’m sure, if you put your mind to it, you can think of other, equally fun ways to foist those license plate pieces off onto some else and make it their problem. Please do not mail it to me.
Or – and this is the most fun way to get rid of an old license plate – Get some nice strong, flat magnets, then take it to work with you and, using the magnets, mount it over the license plate on your boss’s car. Then report it stolen.
here i go, off on a tangent. blame gonzo for mentioning wal-mart and cars. our local wal-mart had a bomb scare this past year. the whole wal-mart was evacuated. there was one customer left abandoned. his car was getting an oil change.
No, not really. The plates are pretty reflective, actually. And the plates that I"ve used are mostly dark letters on a white background.
And the design of the houses allows for lots of air to escape; I leave about a 1/2" space between the roof (plate) and the side walls, as well as a space between the floor and two of the side walls.
If that’s the case, they’re tracking a very stationary “vehicle” that is now hanging on the branch of an apple tree somewhere in the middle of Nowhere, Maine.
When I was in the car business we always had stacks of them back in the cleanup department. My best friend collected them for a while but he eventually got enough to cover an entire wall in his “guy room”. After he didn’t want them any more, I would tell the cleanup guys to break them in half and toss them in the dumpster but the path of least resistance led to them being neatly stacked in the corner of the wash stall. Nobody wanted 'em.
About every 2 years or so I would make them toss the stall and throw all of the garbage that had accumulated away including the license plates. By then there were always too many piled up to bother breaking them up or anything. I never got any calls from customers about tickets or anything like that.
