{"id":3602,"date":"2018-10-08T15:51:28","date_gmt":"2018-10-08T19:51:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.leucht.com\/blog\/?p=3602"},"modified":"2018-10-08T15:59:03","modified_gmt":"2018-10-08T19:59:03","slug":"how-to-make-a-custom-license-plate-bracket-for-your-car","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.leucht.com\/blog\/2018\/10\/how-to-make-a-custom-license-plate-bracket-for-your-car\/","title":{"rendered":"How to make a custom license plate bracket for your car"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you’ve followed me for any length of time, you probably noticed that I like to make things myself<\/a> if I can, rather than buy them.\u00a0 Most of my projects are in wood<\/a>, but occasionally I do some light metal-work out of necessity.<\/p>\n

In today’s installment, I will show you how I was able to make a custom fitted metal bracket which allowed me to mount an old vanity plate to the front of my new-to-me car.\u00a0 Hopefully, this information ends up being useful to someone out there in the Interwebs.<\/p>\n

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My new-to-me car is a 2010 Honda Civic SI.\u00a0 She’s a beaut, isn’t she?\u00a0 But when I tried to mount my vanity tag, which has my name on it, to the front of the car, the mounting holes were nowhere near where they needed to be.\u00a0 Apparently, a mounting bracket is required here.\u00a0 In my prior car, a 2004 Chrysler PT Cruiser, I just drilled holes right into the plastic bumper and screwed the plate right in.\u00a0 But this car is quite a bit too new and much too nice for that technique.<\/p>\n

I looked at my local auto parts stores for a bracket, assuming that it was some sort of common standard, but I came up empty.\u00a0 So I looked around my woodworking shop to see what I had laying around.\u00a0 Luckily, I had just the thing.\u00a0 I had a couple unused pieces of thin steel perforated\u00a0 angle iron from my new garage door opener.\u00a0 If you don’t have any laying around, your local home improvement store sells this sort of material.\u00a0 Just search for Metal Angles<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Notice in the photo above, the cardboard prototype on the bench.\u00a0 Making a cardboard prototype of the final product was step one in this process.\u00a0 It will save you a lot of time and frustration if you always start out by making a cardboard version first<\/a>!\u00a0 You can see in the cardboard design, that the bracket needs to swoop up, go straight across, and then swoop back down.\u00a0 Easy peasy!<\/p>\n

The second step was to fold over the angle iron to make it into a flat plate.\u00a0 Mashing it between my hammer and my bench vise<\/a> worked nicely.<\/p>\n

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Then I hammered it into a 90 degree angle by squeezing it in my bench vise and hammering it over and nicely flat.\u00a0 The bench vise makes it easy to create sharp angles like this out of thin steel.<\/p>\n

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The curved section was a bit more work.\u00a0 And it took some trial and error.\u00a0 A round tip anvil<\/a> might have been the right tool for this part, but sometimes you have to deal with the tools that are in your toolbox.<\/p>\n

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So here is the bracket compared to the cardboard prototype.\u00a0 Not too shabby.<\/p>\n

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And a bit more sweat got it looking like so!\u00a0 Yep, my cardboard prototype was from a Fruit Loops cereal box.\u00a0 Don’t judge me!<\/p>\n

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After passing the side by side comparison test with the cardboard prototype, I hacked off the extra material with a … you guessed it … hacksaw<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Now a fit check to the actual license tag was in order.\u00a0 Looking good!<\/p>\n

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Then the holes were marked and drilled.\u00a0 By the way, if you work mostly with wood, like I do, don’t use your wood drill bits for steel!\u00a0 If you don’t ruin the bits completely, you will at least dull them terribly.\u00a0 Do yourself a favor and buy a set of hardened bits just for metal.<\/p>\n

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Here is a photo of the finished product!\u00a0 It worked like a charm!\u00a0 And it looks great!<\/p>\n

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I mean the bracket itself doesn’t look all that great.\u00a0 But it’s completely hidden behind the vanity plate!\u00a0 So why spend 20 bucks on a fancy tag bracket when nobody ever sees it!<\/p>\n

Thanks for your interest!<\/p>\n

If you have any comments or questions, feel free to leave a comment or click on the Email Us link at the bottom of the page!<\/p>\n

Kurt<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you’ve followed me for any length of time, you probably noticed that I like to make things myself if I can, rather than buy them.\u00a0 Most of my projects are in wood, but occasionally I do some light metal-work out of necessity. In today’s installment, I will show you how I was able to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[112],"tags":[45,206,205],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.leucht.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3602"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.leucht.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.leucht.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.leucht.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.leucht.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3602"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.leucht.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3602\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3623,"href":"http:\/\/www.leucht.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3602\/revisions\/3623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.leucht.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.leucht.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.leucht.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}