Painted lower lip - part One

[WarpedOne]

Here are quick mockups of a painted lower lip:

 

[WarpedOne]

some more:

 

[WarpedOne]

If we disregard my artistic abilities, I think painting the lower lip will be a great way to personalize the Roadster.

 

[tonybelding]

Incidentally, I still can't view attachments in messages from this account, I have to log into another account to see them.  

A couple of caveats when it comes to painting the bumper. . .

I think it is supposed to be flexible, so if you actually bump something with it, then the paint might possibly crack or peel.

It will also be exposed to a lot of abuse from bouncing gravel near the road surface, and catch a lot of dings and chips.

This is why I suggested putting colored vinyl tape on it, because the tape would be easy to replace if it becomes scuffed, dinged, bug-and-tar stained, etc.

 

[malcolm]

More mock-ups.

Tony - going back to your comment about the mandatory front license plates possibly looking like buck teeth, do you feel that the painted lip exaggerates or diminishes this effect?

 

[tonybelding]

Tony - going back to your comment about the mandatory front license plates possibly looking like buck teeth, do you feel that the painted lip exaggerates or diminishes this effect?

Bleh. . . If anything, I guess it makes it worse. I do think you made the plates look too small in your images.

 

[malcolm]

I do think you made the plates look too small in your images.

Should the vertical edges of the plate just match the horizontal distance between the bolt holes just visible on the front of the Roadster? Or is the plate even wider?

 

[tonybelding]

[Should the vertical edges of the plate just match the horizontal distance between the bolt holes just visible on the front of the Roadster?  Or is the plate even wider?

You can't use those bolt holes as any kind of guide, because they are spaced for a British plate, which is a completely different shape from our American plates. (British and European plates are wider but not as tall.)

I just think it looks like the plate needs to be scaled up about 20-25 percent. . . and there should be a thin black outline, because there will surely be some kind of plastic mounting bracket.

 

[malcolm]

Too much?

 

[tonybelding]

That certainly looks more like it.

I wish we didn't have to put those things on our cars. There was talk last year about rescinding the requirement for a front plate in Texas, but the Department of Public Safety lobbied against that, and nothing came of it.

We also had a court ruling that forbids the use of most license plate frames. Any kind of frame that obscures any part of the plate's graphics -- even the little decorations around the edges -- is now illegal in Texas.

 

[malcolm]

The rules got tighter on this side of the pond about 4 years ago.

http://www.car.co.uk/number-plates/law/

No more script typefaces or turning 8's into B's etc.

 

[TEG]

The first plate mock up was too small, but the 2nd looks a tad too big.

The front license plate laws in California are a bit liberal about placement. They can be on the side, low, or high.
Some people even put them on their dashboard facing through the front window. I am not sure if that is completely legit or not, but I have seen a lot doing that.

I saw a Ferrari F40 where the plate was mounted flat on the lower lip facing up. So the plate was parallel with the road about 3" above the road. You could read it easily when right in front of the car, but from a distance you wouldn't see it at all. I don't know if that met the letter of the law or not.

 

[doug]

Just doing a little moderator's house keeping. Did all the images from this thread get lost?

 

[TEG]

At one point this site was unavailable with a note about ISP bandwidth exceeded. Site owner called in a consultant who removed all the site hosted images to make the site offer less bytes per view, so yes, images which had been upload (as apposed to embedded by links) were removed.

Dsacks has suggested that he may have those images on a backup, and may try to put them back online someday, so you might want to check with him to see if this (and other) topic could have the old images restored.

 

[doug]

Yeah, I vaguely remember something like that happening. It was before my moderator days. I went looking for this thread because of this photo.

 

[TEG]

Well this topic had mockups of the front lip of the car painted body color rather than just black plastic. Slightly different from what they were showing off in the other topic. Also, in the other topic, we don't see the front, so we don't know if they painted the lower lip orange on that car.

 

[doug]

Yes, I am aware of the differences.