ALPCA Garden State Region

Last week we took a look at 2006 3M National Correctional Industries Association (NCIA) souvenir plate. This week we look at a Prop “1979 Base” New Jersey Passenger plate.

As we mentioned a few weeks ago when we took a look at a 1970s vintage prop plate doing a poor job of imitating a 1979 base plate, studio art departments and prop houses created prop plates. As time progressed they got better at it as this plate circa the 1980s-1990s proves.

The screen printed “dies” for the state name and Garden State slogan are pretty dead on accurate as are the colors. However, the “dies” for the plate number emulate California ones, as can be seen on this plate from the same supplier with a number 4 in its serial.This use of the California type of dies is fairly typical with prop plates from the 1980s to today.

Now there is one other thing they didn’t get quite right on this particular prop plate. The state shaped separator dash is upside down. Guess the prop makers in Los Angeles don’t know the proper orientation of New Jersey!

If you have a plate you would like featured as a Plate of the Week, please contact us or put a photo of the plate in our flickr group and drop us a line.

Last week we took a look at a circa 2005 Vanity plate and delved into the use of the letters O and Q. This week we look at a 2006 3M National Correctional Industries Association (NCIA) souvenir plate.

The National Correctional Industries Association (NCIA) is an professional association made up of employees of the various corrections departments in the U.S. who deal with prison industries and the various vendors that serve them. One fairly common thing produced by such prison industry is license plates, with New Jersey producing theirs at Bayside Prison in Cumberland County.

In March of 2006 the NCIA held their collection in Atlantic City and one of the vendors was 3M. who is a major supplier of license plate reflective sheeting and other license plate related technologies. At conventions such as this, such as the convention of the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, 3M produces a plate as a tchotchke often using their digital license plate system to produce personalized flat plates.

Oddly this plate states “This 3M Digital License Plate was produced especially for you.” However, it is not a flat plate it is an embossed one and the dies reveal that it is not one produced in New Jersey. Judging by the dies one of the two vendors for Illinois plates – Waldale Manufacturing Ltd. or Macon Resources.

Regardless of where it is from, it is an interesting oddball plate with a Garden State connection.

If you have a plate you would like featured as a Plate of the Week, please contact us or put a photo of the plate in our flickr group and drop us a line.

Last week we took a look at a circa 2003 Commercial Sample plate. This week we look at a circa 2005 Vanity plate.

We have been unable to decode the cryptic message on this plate, but that’s not important right now. What is important is that this plate has two characters not normally seen together on New Jersey license plates – O and Q.

From 1992 onward, the letter O was only found on plates for Omnibuses, Livery, and Limousines as well as vanity plates. We should also note that the letter O (along with the letter I) can be found on remakes of pre-1992 passenger plates.

The letter Q is a different story. As expected, it can be found on vanity plates, but since 1964 it has been the exclusive province of the historic plate which always has a pair of Qs in the serial. Even the Historic Vanity plates have a stacked pair of Qs on them. Although back in the early oughts there was a documented spotting of a Firefighter plate with a Q in the serial, but that was probably an isolated error.

If you have a plate you would like featured as a Plate of the Week, please contact us or put a photo of the plate in our flickr group and drop us a line.

Last week we took a look at a 1970s Prop “1959 Base” New Jersey Passenger plate. This week we look at a circa 2003 Commercial Sample plate.

At first glance nothing seems to be wrong with this Commercial Sample plate from 2003. It has the standard Avery sheeting used at the time and everything seems to be spelled correctly.However, something is a bit odd here.

There are two oddities to this plate. The first is that the letter O die is used in place of the zero die. The narrower dies introduced for use on the new reflective plates in 1992 use a rounded zero, while the letter O die remained basically the same as its wider counterpart. Previously the zero and letter O dies were the same.

This letter O for zero switch can be found on other types of sample plates and it is not known how many of these exist.

So what is the other odd thing about this plate? The XAB-12C format was first issued in 1970. In 2003, commercial plates began to be issued in a XA-123B format. New Jersey tends to make some sample plates using older formats on newer bases. For example, the current boxless passenger samples have been seen with serials of AAA-OOO and ABC-OOO.

So when you next encounter a New Jersey sample plate, you might want to take a closer look at the serial format and to see if the zeros are really zeros.

If you have a plate you would like featured as a Plate of the Week, please contact us or put a photo of the plate in our flickr group and drop us a line.