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The License Plate
The morning after I brought the car home, I
put my new license plates on it. It was then that I noticed that
the rear license plate was not installed properly. There were two
brackets on the rear of the car which the plate was supposed to be
bolted to. Both bolts in those brackets were broken off.
Lower in the brackets, two large holes were drilled, and a pair of "J"
clips were threaded through them. The license plate was attached
with a pair of screws through the "J" clips, and into the bumper cover.
With this arrangement, the license plate was hanging well below the rear
bumper of the car, and looked to be in jeopardy of falling off at any
time.
Thankfully enough, this was a reasonably simple repair.
I started by removing the license plate, and the pair of "J" clips that
were holding it in place. I then used my Dremel Stylus tool with a
fiberglass cutoff wheel to grind the protruding ends of the broken bolts
flat. Once the bolts were ground down, I marked the center of each
bolt with a center punch, and drilled the bolts out with my Makita
cordless drill. The bolts were frozen into the threads pretty
good, so I wasn't able to remove them cleanly, and wound up drilling the
threads out to get a clean hole to work with.
The next step was to tap new threads into the holes. I
used a 1/4" x 20 TPI tap (yeah, I know I should have used metric like
everything else in the car) to create new threads in the holes.
Once the threading was done, I cleaned up the metal dust and chips.
I then hammered the brackets flat, as they had been bent up pretty good
when they were drilled out for the "J" clips. Once the brackets
were straight and flat, I went back to the Dremel with the cutting wheel
to grind off the rust and chipped paint. I then masked off the
rest of the area, wiped down the brackets with rubbing alcohol, and
sprayed on a couple coats of primer, followed by some black Rustoleum.
A couple of new 1/2" long 1/4" bolts, and flat washers finished up the
repair nicely. |