in case you didn’t know it, Texas has a yom (year of manufacture) law. what that means is that if you have a vehicle older than 25 years, you can find Texas plates from that year and use them on your vehicle instead of the current plates.
after a few weeks of poking around on ebay and watching 1965 Texas plates sell, i finally managed to get a pair at a price i thought was only somewhat higher than i should be able to get them for. (of course, others sold for higher — so maybe my idea of what i should be able to get them for is off.) anyway, i got them in the mail a week or two after the auction ended. i didn’t buy unused ones, but these are in pretty good shape. (a cool thing about pre-1969 plates is they aren’t reflectorized, so you can strip and repaint them fairly easily — which i may do at some point.)
a few days later i took them down to the local tax office so the dmv could approve them (the condition, and that no one currently has the same plate id). that all went well, so i now have them on my ’65 ford f-100 instead of the generic modern plates.
it’d be cool if my plates were “HaVoK 666”, but i manipulated the plate a bit in fireworks. still, it’s pretty cool to have 1965 plates on my pickup, and it’s a license i can remember pretty easily.
I had no idea such a law existed. I knew after 25 years you could get classic plates, and on my Ford I have antique plates, but thats really cool that you can use actual plates from the time and re-register them.
yep. in fact, just this weekend i saw some muscle car convertible with 1968 plates. and there’s a guy who goes to west alabama ice house a lot with an old yellow 50’s chevy pickup with a 50’s plate on it.
i’m trying to remember how i had to register them…i think you can choose classic or antique with them, then the plate id is entered as personalized. i chose “classic” because it is just a special designation for vehicles over 25 years with no restrictions, while getting “antique” plates means you’re not supposed to drive it around town except to parades and events or something (limited mileage).
the thing that kind of sucks for me is during the 60’s Texas flipped years between black plates with white letters and white plates with black letters. odd years were white plates, so that’s what i’ve got. it’d be cooler and more noticeable to have black plates with white letters. oh well. next time i’ll have to get the 1966 ford f-100. 🙂 (unfortunately, one of the only noticeable differences between the ’65 and ’66 is the grill, and i like the ’65 better. although most people seem to prefer the ’66.)
Very nice — you’re making this ol’ Texas boy jealous…
So, I take it your plates don’t end in 666.