Here’s the 2024 outtake round-up… pictures that didn’t make it into any 2Cents columns, most of which are being seen here for the first time. Enjoy!

I was in downtown Ottawa on the way to the dentist when I noticed this Quebec Diplomat plate. I began to wonder if perhaps one of the many embassies in Ottawa might have property on the Hull side of the river, thus necessitating a Quebec diplomatic plate. I asked Alan Bones, who is a retired diplomat and a guru of diplomatic plates. He indicated that embassies have to be located in the national capital, thus on the Ontario side of the river and any diplomatic vehicles can only have Ontario plates. The reason this Quebec plate exists is because the International Civil Aviation Organization, an arm of the United Nations, is headquartered in Montreal. The vehicle may have been in Ottawa on business.

I stopped restoring plates for YOM resale this year in preparation for closing my small business. Many reasons factor into it, but it boils down to being tired of spending enormous time and energy on something that doesn’t turn my crank the way it used to. Here’s an evening garage shot after a few hours spent painting plates.

Another restoration shot– but this one shows the grunt work of priming and sanding through many cycles. Sanding primer down is a dirty job, and it was a stage I grew to hate. I would often take pictures of my finished pairs hanging on the wall, but this time, I took a picture of myself covered in primer dust, as a reminder of just one reason to quit.

I’ve been seeing more A.I. “art” online in various banner ads on the websites I visit. I got curious one day and used ChatGPT to create an illustration of a person in a workshop, painting Ontario licence plates. I never intended to use that as promo for my small business—especially since I’m closing it down shortly—but I was amused at the result, and I filed it away. It captures the utilitarian atmosphere of my garage where I did most of my painting, although I don’t have any windows, and it doesn't allude to the gruelling job of sanding primer.

I stayed in Kingston with my son for a day in April while we were chasing the solar eclipse that happened on April 8. I found this cleverly-plated Triumph TR6 while on a walk down at the waterfront. This picture was taken the day before the eclipse. There were clouds moving in the next day, so we headed eastward toward Sherbrooke, Quebec for what was a much better view (my pictures of the eclipse itself aren't worth posting here. It was an in-person sort of thing).

Eric Vettoretti and I were hunting for plates one weekend in the spring and passed through the tiny town of Flinton. A guy that Eric knows lives in a converted drill hall and uses one half of it as an auto body shop. We didn’t get any plates from him this time; they were a bit pricey and there was nothing we really needed. But the wall made for a neat picture.

Just a cool Ducks Unlimited optional plate with a good sound effect.

Part of a batch of plates that I acquired in the summer. I had to wait about three weeks before I could get to Toronto to pick them up. I’m glad the seller was understanding! It turned out that there were a few other plates in addition to these. I was initially thinking I’d clean the old Nova Scotia plate, but I brightened it up enough that I kept it.

My son and I spent a few days on Wolfe Island in the summer. It’s the former home of three former provincial highways, which were downloaded to Frontenac County over two decades ago. One of them is interesting: The little-known 7000-series highways are not actually marked, but when this road to the winter ferry dock was downloaded, its number was kept and signed. King’s Highways 95 and 96 span the island, running along the concession lines with many right-angled “steps” along the way. These roadways look like the King’s Highways of the 1930s and 40s that reside in my imagination. On another note: I’ve never seen a “no littering” sign that actually shows a photo of some jerk littering.

A Ministry of Transportation car, parked at the Wolfe Island ferry dock. But there’s no bumblebee sticker because the whole face of the plate has peeled away. There was another similar vehicle parked next to it, with its plates and bee sticker intact. I wonder, can the province issue itself a fine?

My son and I found ourselves fishing in another tiny Ontario town, which has a bait and hunting supply shop on the main street. It had a few Ontario plates on the walls in various spots, but they were the typical 1960s and 1970s varieties that are easy to find. But then I found a 1925 and a 1917 in a corner behind a rack of mackinaws.

This is my son Greg by the front gate of the red barn antique shop that’s run by the European guy in Norwood. I took my time there and found a whole bunch of really good mid-era truck and trailer plates inside the store, but even the cheap ones started at $60 per pair. I’ve still never bought anything there, but it’s fun to look every few years.

Sorting out some plates on a summer day in the garage. By the looks of what’s there, I was probably taking pictures to post them for sale. In the background are some of the flat boxes I bought from Keith Murphy, which were kindly brought to me at the ALPCA Convention in Lansing by Brent Kirchner.

Ever come across plates with a rusty background, but good numbers? Back in the day when I wasn’t as good at detailing the numbers, I would mask the original paint off before overcoating a rusty background. That way, I could preserve the numbers, which looked better than any work I could do at the time. Cutting the numbers and legends out of masking tape was time-consuming, so I saved them in a binder for re-use. I gradually stopped this practice, but kept the binder on the shelf in my shop, just in case I ever needed the numbers again. I never used them again. I found them after many years, took a picture, and threw them out.

Eric put a farmer in touch with me over the summer. He had this pump permit plate with a cool number. These plates are are really interesting, because they were painted in different colours than vehicle plates of the same year. There are still a bunch of years for which either no examples are known to survive, or the colour combinations are unknown.

When I was a kid in Sault Ste. Marie, we had several signalized intersections downtown where certain streets met at an angle, so some traffic lights used directional filters, or lenses on the green light, like this one. It’s old technology that has mostly been phased out. But this filtered example still existed in Toronto at Queen and York Streets during the summer of 2024. However, it won’t be long until that section of Queen is ripped up to build the Ontario Line subway, and preparations were already underway to fit the intersections with temporary signals on tension cables, so that the posts could be pulled out. The older signal continued to do its job while the newer, nascent signal lay in wait.

In the summer, I was on vacation in northern Ontario—again— and driving around the backroads, looking for interesting signs or plate-related scenes. I’m not a fan of roadkill plates, personally, and I generally won’t stop for them (unlike the guys in online groups who stop their cars on freeways and risk public safety to “rescue” a hopelessly-battered metal rectangle). But it’s a different story on the northern Ontario backroads, where I’ll stop to take a picture. This trailer plate was bolted hard onto a galvanized steel gate. Here’s me, pretending it’s a victory.

I spied an interesting short-numbered 1961 plate in my trader box this summer: L-7447. When I looked at my past photos, I realized it had a number that was very similar to a plate that I nailed to the wall of my rental cabin years ago: B-7447. We now rent more than one cabin, so the guys’ team and girls’ team have room to stretch out. The B-plate is now in the girls’ cabin, so I brought the L-plate to mount in the guys’ cabin.

My mother-in-law told me about a garage located in the area that was shingled with plates from top to bottom. She couldn’t quite recall where it was, but she gave me the names of a couple of inland lakes. It was enough of a breadcrumb trail that I was eventually able to make a best-guess of the road where the building was. And so my son and I hopped in the car and started driving. We had almost reached the road’s end when I spotted the garage. It didn’t have that many Ontario plates, or Canadian ones even. Whoever shingled the building had a large supply of Indiana plates from the 1980s. Still, a very interesting sight to see, in the middle of nowhere.

I went to Amherst, Massachusetts at the start of November to take in a reunion concert performed by a alt-rock trio that’s near and dear to my heart. I never got to see them the first time around, and then the lineup disbanded. I rented a Buick Envision for the weekend. It was a well-appointed car, but the controls were something to get used to. Instead of a cluster, I had a long screen that stretched more than halfway across the dash. There was no hood above the screen, so I had to deal with an annoying reflection across my windshield when driving at night. The wiper control stalk that I expected on the right of the steering column was actually the gear shifter. To operate the wipers, I had to look down from the road at my screen to figure out where to touch it. And it took me a day to figure out that the unmarked twist knob on the floor console was in fact, a volume knob, that I could use to finally stop Siri from deafening me with every route announcement. I didn’t drive the car enough to get used to it, so it loses by forfeit. Anyway, here’s the plate.

While in Amherst, I encountered a rude traffic crosswalk. Someone had already pushed the button across the street, to get the “walk” light on the next cycle. But I didn’t know that. So I pushed the button on my side—

“WAIT.”

What?

I pushed the button again and was again admonished by an impatient deadpan voice: “WAIT.”

Not “please wait,” or an innocuous chime, or even a non-response. Just a rudely-toned “WAIT.” As if the next word was going to be “ASSHOLE.”

I had never been to Connecticut before, so the morning after my concert, I took the time to cross the state line and add Connecticut to my list of visited states. That’s almost all of New England for me, but I’ve still not been to Maine.

Connecticut still uses button copy signage on its Interstates. Maybe it’s being phased out, but I saw several examples still in service. This I-91 onramp sign has seen better days. The sun was coming in from the side, with shadows cast to one side of the buttons and strips.

To commemorate my entry in Connecticut, I chose a country road that spanned the state line, in the hope that there would be some kind of marker. I wasn’t disappointed. There’s a concrete pillar marking the exact boundary between Somers, CT and East Longmeadow, MA. I find that sort of thing interesting. My region of Ontario is mostly bounded by waterways, and in the few places where there’s a land boundary with Quebec, the signs are either placed approximately, or there are no markers at all—pillars or otherwise.

My daughter was in the car with me when we spotted this Cat Pee plate in traffic. I had her get the picture. Being 999, that would make this the last drop of cat pee. Plate collectors long for these, not only because of the cat reference, but also because these were made for Ontario by Waldale, in the time before they had a proper set of Ontario number dies, which is why the numbers look like those used in PEI, Nova Scotia, and Alberta, among others. I was especially glad to get this picture, because I took a picture of the “first drop of Cat Pee” several years ago when I was walking downtown.

Back in Ontario, I went to Merrickville with my wife to do some Christmas shopping. I’ve been to Merrickville many times before. One odd thing about it— it has a flashing green beacon at the start of its downtown core. Rather than a four-way stop, traffic coming south has full right-of-way over all other directions, and doesn’t stop. So to make this more obvious, the beacon facing this traffic was made green, and a cryptic “caution” sign also stands to advise southbound motorists not to stop. Locals have no issue with this, but I don’t know what an out-of-towner might make of it. I’m not sure that a flashing green beacon is MUTCD-compliant. Historically, a flashing green signal means that traffic has an advance left turn while oncoming traffic still has a red, but that method of signalization has since been phased out. Why can’t south bound traffic stop, thus making the intersection a standard 4-way stop? Probably because of the swing bridge that crosses the Rideau Canal just north of the intersection (behind the camera). In the summer, this single-lane road can get a little busy, so maybe it’s to clear as much southbound traffic as possible in between bridge movements.