A little thing but one that I think turned out bitchin'. Hawaii requires a front license plate. CA did as well but never enforced this that I know of. HI on the other hand, checks as part of their annual safety inspection.
Too bad since I like the nose without a plate.
The other challenge I have that my neato mesh grill blocks access to the factory license plate bracket mount point on the bumper cross member.
I really didn't want to drill holes in my shiny--still fairly fresh paint--bumper cover. Cutting slots in the mesh seams like a lot of work and again, I'm not excited about the holes (or pulling off the whole nose to mount a license plate). There's also an issue that the front plate is kinda big relative to the shape of the nose so it either blocks the radiator opening or sits up higher than looks natural. I did a high mount setup slightly angled backward back in CA and it was OK but I was never quite happy with it.
I also wanted to fully support the edges of the plate so it wouldn't bend or deform over time. That happened to my CA setup too. After starring it at a bit I decided to try mounting the plate to my SS mesh insert. No holes and it seems plenty stout.
Bit of use with a surface gauge and I ended up with this CAD template. Surprisingly skinny once I actually laid it out.
The trick to make this work is that I bent the lower edge of my plate. This skinnies up the landing on the nose and makes the bottom edge a bunch stiffer. I have a coworker here in Hawaii running a front plate that he has bent down to nothing but the letters and he's gotten away with it for 5+ years. I decided to be a bit more subtle and only added a single bend on the lower edge. There are some regulations about not defacing license plates as government property but I didn't find anything specific about what I did. Worst case, I have a cop get pissed and I bend it back.
Bar and clamps to bend. Also some aluminum angle iron and rivet nuts starting to form the top edge. That got shaved to match the bumper curvature too.
The backside of the framework I formed over and welded (at least partly). Crustly old aluminum scrap makes for tough welding, but I got it good enough. Less heat in the rear so the weld looks shitty, sorry. It's hidden and the front side welding was probably enough.
I also did some whittling in the corners.
Why? For rubber trim of course!
There is a lower cross bar tucked back there too, so 4x rev nuts and the result is well supported on all sides. 4x zip ties per side hold it on (because you gotta have a little redundancy when relying on zip ties.)
The result:
It's as tight at I could get it while keeping the cross section at the sides reasonable and maybe it clears the bumper by 1/4" or so in the middle of the plate. I like proportionally it just fits a hell of a lot better on the nose, but it's still subtle enough with the mods that's it's not in your face. No one caught it my autocross shots so think I did a good job of getting it right and being sly about the mod.
It's the kinda stuff that's changed--but you almost can't figure out why since it looks so right--that gets me excited these days. Bitchin' eh?
-Joel
