The Stovebolt Site Forums The Shop Area Paint and Body Shop nearly unreadable VIN plate: any way to restore??

Found an old truck which had been cut into pieces. Owner gave me anything I wanted. I pulled the VIN plate from the right side firewall cowl. It's a 1946. Plate is steel; must have been galvanized? Stamped number is, of course, readable. The rest of the plate is mostly a medium gray haze. Holding it just-so in the light, I can read some of it. I'm afraid to scrub much with anything. Has anyone had much luck, "restoring," even some of the readability in these??? Tips? Thanks, Dennis

if you can remove it, put it in an electrolysis bath.

I am also restoring a 1944 John Deere B tractor and could not decipher all the numbers on the SN. Could get enough to get the year, but that was all.

Take the plate and place in a plastic container. I have found that plastic Maxwell House coffee cans work best (have a recess for the handle that seperates the electrode from the part.

Fill with water and about a teaspoon of baking soda, wire some baling wire or some other wire through the hole. place in the water. take a piece of salvage metal and slip down in the hole. take a old fashioned (non-automatic) battery charger and connect the positive lead to the salvage piece and place the negative to the part needed to remove the rust/oxidation. turn the charger on and let it sit for a few hours. remove. it will oxidize a little, but will wipe off. should make it more readable.

On a related note, this works on any metal, to remove rust. save the busted knuckles and worn arms. you can put as big a part as you can submerge in a non-metallic container. You can also add some lye to the water and not only remove rust, but paint as well. Has saved me HOURS of work.

Mine had been painted over and trying to remove the new paint also was removing the original paint. I ended up having to buy & stamp a reproduction data plate. Electrolysis won't help unless your issue is rust. You should be able to get a replacement data plate from one or more of the vendors. If you are a VCCA member there's a fellow making & selling data plates to members already correctly stamped for $15. All of the repop data plates I've seen are aluminum instead of the original material (galvanized steel???).

Another difference is, I believe, that the new plates are etched and the originals have some kind of a film applied that contains the writing. Furthermore, the lettering is a different size than the original, at least on the 39-41 truck plates, and consequently they look really bad.
I'm scheming up a method to restore originals, but am not ready to report yet.

I have never used these people and it seems that I have heard mixed reviews but their site is interesting. Ftrom what I understood, they will make you give proof of ownership to make sure that you are not having them help hide a stolen vehicle.
http://www.datatags.com/

if your just trying to get the data off of it take a piece of paper and cover the tag then use a carpenders pencil and scribble lightly over the tag it should transfer the data to the paper where you can make out what it says.

for the paint/rust issue on electrolysis, use lye (septic tank main line cleaner at Home Depot, sodium hydroxide) will peel the paint right off.

I have a 5 gallon bucket with water and lye that i dump small painted parts, including old license plates in for a few days and pull it out and wipe the old paint away. But this process is without the electric battery charger.