Is this plate with the two bolts supposed to be bare or were they painted silver?
Here is a discussion on that:
They were supposed to be painted body color, but some cars (mine included) didn’t get painted. So the unpainted ones were apparently sometimes left bare metal, or painted silver. I had a late 69 built 70 car that had one that was half bare metal and half painted silver.
Thanks dude. The ones I am prepping were painted silver on outside and had a black primer inside. Most look painted silver but just wanted to verify.
Yes, my car and another example plate I got from WCCC both had black primer front and back and silver paint on front side and edges. Probably what was originally on your car too since they were built in Detroit about the same time.
Typically they were painted body color over a base color (from the supplier) and typically placed some where on the unibody before the exterior coat so they got painted with the body. Often on an original cars you can find the shadows of the plates on the top or edge of the cowl (though this area is typically blacked out (top of the cowl) when the factory extended the engine compartment black up and into the windshield opening
Its also believed by a fair share of people that workers could and did drop the painted ones while doing the install and rather than chase them just grabbed some ones from a box/container provided at that station for just that purpose.
It would make sense for the plates in the box at that station to be painted silver so they would work on any color car whose body color plates were missing or had been dropped. Maybe that’s how some cars ended up with the silver ones. Wonder if any cars ended up with a mix of silver and body colored plates?
I have one 1970 cougar (christmas 1969) and it has the silver painted plates, while the other, a Oct 69 (1970 eliminator) has the plates painted body colour. On my eliminator you can see the shadows of the plates on top of the rear parcel shelf.
So the silver…??? can you see metallic in the paint or is it just silver like a silver cad. Can only find two silver paints. I have a couple of original plates that are silver but can’t tell for sure. Eastwood sells a silver cad that’s not metallic and every other silver I find is aluminum metallic or silver metallic.
