I hate rust. It slowly eats away at the things I hold dear. Now, for another permanent solution to a temporary problem, let’s de-rust and paint the springy license plate holder! My favorite tool for this is the sandblaster, there’s a chemical called evaporust that I will be covering in the future but for now let’s mechanically strip this part.
like night and day.
I like how this process clearly shows what the un-tarnished metal should look like so you know when you are done. Getting in the nooks and crannies is a bit tiring, but it will be worth it to not have the rust come back. After wiping it down with solvent I screwed it down to a back board to get paint under the sprung bit. This took several coats and several different mounting methods to get complete coverage.
spread eagle and covered in white…
Once the paint is dry I used rubber cement to attach the rubber strip along the top to protect the plate. I have plastic inserts on the bottom for machine screws to fit in, but the top ones have gone missing which is why mine is held in by stainless bolts and nylon wing nuts.
doesn’t that look better?
I took the time to clean the area around it with a nylon scrub brush, a green/yellow sponge, and some soap. I think it looks a lot better now and I just keep telling myself if I do this one piece at a time I will eventually have a very low maintenance ride.
lookin’ good
I have had friends tell me they recently found out where the fuel filler is in a ’56 Chevy, or that older cars used to have them behind the license plate to which I surprise them by saying that my car does that. I’m not concerned about removing my locking gas cap because the location of the filler on this car is almost as much of a deterrent to gas thieves as if it were three on the tree and they were car thieves.
The home page for this project is here, it has a link to the album of pictures.
Evan's Techie-Blog 