{"id":174,"date":"2010-10-06T02:01:09","date_gmt":"2010-10-06T02:01:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/murileemartin.com\/wordpress\/?p=174"},"modified":"2010-10-06T02:01:09","modified_gmt":"2010-10-06T02:01:09","slug":"unintended-consequences-new-plates-cause-marker-light-shedding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/murileemartin.com\/wordpress\/?p=174","title":{"rendered":"Unintended Consequences: New Plates Cause Marker Light Shedding"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nMy much-traveled daily-driver ’92 Civic<\/a> arrived in Colorado in June, but the California registration tags were good until September 30th. Why pay for three months of registration twice? Eventually, however, I had to get some Colorado plates… and installation of said plates caused the car to start dropping parts on the highway.
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\nThe Denver County DMV was much more pleasant than its California counterpart, and getting the new plates turned out to be cheap and relatively painless. The hard part is over, right?
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\nWell, no. The car was originally purchased in Virginia, then lived in Chicago for nearly a decade before moving to San Francisco (where it was broken into and\/or hit by other cars on a regular basis).
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\nThe front license-plate mounting hardware was all rusted to shit, thanks to those years in Chicago, and the entire front body of the car had been destroyed and (partially) replaced by the previous owner. Sadly, the shop that did this job believed in saving time and money by discarding 80% of the fasteners involved. Somehow, I managed to drive the car for almost 5 years without noticing that the fenders, headlights, and marker lights were held in place by a tiny fraction of the original mounting hardware.
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\nAfter removing the front bumper cover, I managed to drill out the hardware holding the mangled California plate and install my new Colorado plate.
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\nNaturally, the rear plate was also a pain in the ass to install. The rusty mounting screws broke off, I couldn’t find the right size EZ-out to remove their stumps, and I was going to get this goddamn plate installed now<\/em>, no trips to the hardware store! So, I drilled a hole all the way through the tailgate and ran a long bolt through to mount the plate. It’s crooked, but at least it’s legal.
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\nIt was at this point that all the loose hardware in front became apparent. After driving 15 miles to the junkyard, I noticed that my right turn signal was flashing very quickly, a sign that I’d burned out a light bulb. But no! I’d lost the marker light completely. Back to the junkyard!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My much-traveled daily-driver ’92 Civic arrived in Colorado in June, but the California registration tags were good until September 30th. Why pay for three months of registration twice? Eventually, however, I had to get some Colorado plates… and installation of said plates caused the car to start dropping parts on the highway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[106],"tags":[110,107,109,108],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/murileemartin.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/murileemartin.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/murileemartin.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murileemartin.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murileemartin.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=174"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/murileemartin.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":183,"href":"https:\/\/murileemartin.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174\/revisions\/183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/murileemartin.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murileemartin.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murileemartin.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}