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VIN Tag Issue

Mheiron

Well-Known Member
Local time
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Jul 10, 2020
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Location
Houston Texas
I was prepping the dash for my 69 Charger for paint and had the VIN tag masked off. When I pulled the tape, 1/2 the paint came with it.

Question for the wise men of the forum:

Do I leave it?
Restore it? Where?
Get a new tag? Where?
or something else

The pictures are before and after. It wasn't great in the first place.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

IMG_1026.JPG IMG_1264.jpg
 
The less done to the stuff I buy, the better. I'll forgive a lot in the name of originality.
 
Can this be done with tag in place or must it come out?
Seems pretty 'tight' there...
I don't know how a guy could do a decent job with it in place. I always drill out the rivets, strip, repaint, apply the dry transfer, and reapply with new rivets.
 
Thanks! Just curious if anyone tried it, it's not a 5 minute job for sure.
 
I was prepping the dash for my 69 Charger for paint and had the VIN tag masked off. When I pulled the tape, 1/2 the paint came with it.

Question for the wise men of the forum:

Do I leave it?
Restore it? Where?
Get a new tag? Where?
or something else

The pictures are before and after. It wasn't great in the first place.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

View attachment 1273692 View attachment 1273693
Drill the rivets out, purchase the rivets and dry ink transfer from ECS. Gently remove the paint from the vin tag(Do NOT put in a sand blaster of any kind!) paint with SEMS flat black, install ink transfer and put away to dry. In the meantime, sand, prep and paint your dash frame. When installing your vin back on, remember to always pull up on the rivet gun as to keep the tip from coming into contact and scratching your new work. You will be pleasantly surprised as to how awesome and clean it turns out.
 
Check your state laws. Az just signed into law you can remove and reattach a VIN for a car 1981 or older for the purpose of repair or restoration only. Before it was a class 3 felony.
 
You can remove the rivits by punching out the rivet pin and squeeze the lower part of the rivit.with needle nose vicegrips. To get the rivits to release from the dash sheetmetal.This way you won't ruin the tag by having the rivit spin on you. Then if careful? you can put the original rivits back in using regular store bought pop rivit pins/cores. There have been posts on this before on this forum. And a video i believe. Do a search.
 
If you want to do it in place it's possible but the windshield needs to come out... Honestly to remove it & more accurately to re-install it the windshield needs to come out.... On the good side with the windshield out you'll have better access to paint the top of the dash....
 
Helping a buddy restore a 68 GTX. This is the VIN Tag. I thought that the numbers were supposed to be sanded down clear. It looks cool as hell like this with numbers sanded to bare metal, but I want it to be correct from factory. I worked on this one a bit and scratched just outside the 8. What a pain in the butt... After further research it looks like some originals were all black. I'm thinking in some examples the paint is just rubbed off after years of cleaning the dash. Looking at supposedly originals it looks like there is still some black paint on the top of the numbers. I'm also going to help with a 70 Super Bee. I want to get both VIN tags correct. I have the Chrysler logo from ECS. We are going to attempt to re-use the original rivets as well. I think the new rivets from ECS are a bit to small... Should I just paint the whole tag black and apply the logo without any sanding on the numbers and letters? Appreciate any feedback.

View attachment 1349353
All black...
 
Best be careful doing this. I agree with
JimKueneman...
Some states can actually impound your car
if the vin tag has been tampered with, and
it can become a real nightmare trying to
get your car back. Lots of vin swapping
going on out there, and the cops get mighty
suspicious.
 
Well I'm glad I at least quoted jarheads post last night, that he appears to have deleted!... thought I was going stupid there for a minute as to why this old post came back to the top.

Use a punch ground down to fit the mandrel hole, knock the mandrel out then carefully reshape the rivets shank back to tubular and lift the tag off. After repaint... Grab a couple new rivets, knock the mandrel nails out of them and use those mandrels to reinstall the old VIN rivets that you previously removed... or spend the 50 bucks for two rivets from ECS.
 
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