Tuesday 23 April 2013

Spring is here and time for a bunny look


Think I became bored waiting for the good weather to finally arrive here in the UK. So there have been many and various mods taking place. Some little, some less so, especially in the financial sense.

One thing that I have always felt mildly uncomfortable with is my number plate. Generally drivers of Japanese cars in the UK try to get away with front plates as small as legally possible and in many cases totally illegal. Even for those with a small but legal plate can run into difficulties, as this depends on the local law enforcement actually knowing what the legislation is. I used to get around this by always carrying the department of transports paperwork concerning imported cars, sizing and spacing of letters and plate size.

The main difficulty I had, was that the number plate recess in the GTS 25t is just too small for a rectangular plate with six characters. If I had dug deeper in my pocket when registering the car and gone for five characters it would not have been such an issue. This meant that 'technically' my plate was 2mm 'short' in its overall width, making the car 'a probable' for being found at fault and suitable to causing me a pain in my pocket!

Just stick an import plate on then, although this will significantly reduce airflow to the intercooler. When I thought about it though and with what I already know about the rules for plates. There is no reason why I needed to fit a larger Japanese import plate when a smaller American import plate would do.

Sizes run like this

Japanese 13x7 or smaller at 13x6.5
USA 12x6

Full information about UK plates can be found here

So opting for the smallest two line plate I can, there is still the option of cutting it down at the sides making it even smaller. There is also the option of making the plate a feature with a 'surround' sourced for the American market.

Carbon Fibre Surround
Naturally this would not be a direct fit (that would be too easy) and the surround will require some modification notably in opening up the aperture to suit a double lined UK plate.

Will see how this goes!

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