MTFCA Forum

WOW! Are those porcelain like the 1914's or metal? Either way, unbelievable job.
Are you for hire?

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Bob,
These are metal. The originals are porcelain.
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The 1915 plates were metal with porcelain coating. Did you mean painted?
http://porcelainplates.net/california_archive_2.html

Wow, those look great! Did you do them or did someone make them for you?

Nice work!!

Every time I see old CA plates it makes me think of the two red 1914 plates my grandfather used in the 1940's, '50's and early '60's to scrape apricots off the drying trays. They each had a piece of wood screwed to the upper holes so you could use them without cutting your hands. Being made of heavy meatal with porcelain on both sides they worked well. When he retired and sold the place in '63 sadly they were discarded as just more old junk.

The depth of field threw me off - I thought one was smaller than the other! Beautiful work!

I've always wondered how they made the originals... I have a few, including a matched pair from '14 (red & White) and the blue and white ones (from 16-19), but the only way I could use my '15 (and it's only 1, the other one shattered the face off long ago) is to fill in the missing pieces with paint...

But it got me wondering how they made these originally, and how hard would it be to repop the porcelain plates in porcelain...

Here is the plate for my car I made about a year ago. The top is the original, the middle is printed on paper then glued on steel testing to see if it would look correct. The 5 wasn't quite correct. The last one is ink on steel. These are not street legal, but they do look nice. I also made a 1915 brass registration dash tag using the license plate number. With such good luck on the dash tag, I'm trying to make the center discs of the 1915 high F hub caps then I will attempt to solder them into repro hub caps.

The fonts are wrong on the center one but the bottom one looks good!

Suzanne,
The original porcelain-on-steel California license plates for 1914 and 1915 were made by a manufacturer in Pennsylvania called Ing-Rich. I do not know who made the 1916-1919 porcelainized plates.
The process was similar to that of producing porcelain on cast iron bathtubs, sinks, and cooking range parts, etc.
First a special firing glaze is applied to the base metal. This glaze is not much different than the glaze used for pottery. After the base color is applied, the numbers and letters are silk screened on and then the plate is fired in a kiln. From what I've been told, that's pretty much it.
Now for a little California license plate trivia. Most people believe that license plates here in California have been made by the "California Correctional Industries". This is, for the most part, true. However, the prison system (San Quentin, and while it was functioning, Alcatraz) has only been producing California license plates since 1948. Prior to that, there were only a couple of sheet metal stamping plants that produced them, and they were in Los Angeles.
I once heard a story that, sometime during 1931, a train load of 1932 California license plates were heading from L.A. to Sacramento. Somewhere along the route the train wrecked in a rural area (most of California was "Rural' in 1932) and the wreck caused the cars containing the license plates to spill out on the train tracks. Since all the license numbers were recorded on a manifest, the California Department of the Treasurer (that's the department that oversaw motor vehicle registration in those days) voided all the numbers that were lost in the wreck.
Fast forward to the 60s and 70s. Frequent swap meet attendees here in So.Cal. may remember seeing 1932 California license plates with the back of the plates painted silver or white. The reason? Those were salvaged license plates form the train wreck that had been used as roofing shingles. They were about to get a second life as Y.O.M. license plates after Governor Pete Wilson signed that bill into law.
One last bit. The process of bonding porcelain to steel or cast iron can be credited to a buddy of William Durant. His name was David Dunbar Buick. You may have heard of him.
Hope you're still awake.

Good eye spotting the wrong fonts. I took a best guess at the fonts when I made the center plate. It took several printings on paper to get the background yellow correct. I found a 15 plate and saw the font differences and corrected them before printing them on steel. The fonts on the lower plate are exactly what was on 15 plates. Using photoshop I manipulated the fonts to get them lined up correctly then off to the sign shop to print a set of plates. Ing-Rich is the Ingram-Richardson manufacturing co. in Pennsylvania The 14 plates were thicker than the 15 plates and I've found them in excellent condition.