Uncategorized - Ontplates.com - Ontario Year of Manufacture (YOM) License Plates

Grimsby Swap Meet 2023

The Grimsby Licence Plate Swap meet is coming up on Saturday, October 21. All details can be found in the meet flyer.

The swap meet is a great place to browse and collect licence plates from anywhere and any-when, although Ontario and Canada are best-represented.

Ontplates.com doesn’t operate a formal booth at the Grimsby meet. That’s because I’m too busy co-hosting the meet itself, selling collectible plates, and looking for collectible plates for my own collection. I do bring limited YOM stock from Ontplates.com if either of two situations arise:

Someone is purchasing a YOM pair and has arranged in advance for pick-up in Grimsby to save the $20 shipping, or
Someone has requested in advance that I bring pairs of a certain year so they can see them in person and choose which one they like the most.

In past years, the full Ontplates.com stock was available for casual browsing at these meets. But 99% of the people I see are collectors and not classic car owners looking for YOM pairs, so there was little or no need to have the YOM stock on-hand. So unless I get a request, the stock stays home, and I stick to the hobby side of things.

Read here about Grimsby 2022. The attendance record was shattered that year, with 123 participants. Consider attending if you’re even remotely interested in old licence plates. It’s a lot of fun!

“Keeping on” thru COVID

There’s not much going on in the way of news, but we don’t like to let this part of the site stagnate for too many months.

We’re moving into “wave two” of the COVID pandemic in our section of Ontario. The first wave presented its challenges. The biggest issue for Ontplates was the temporary closure of the Rustoleum factory that makes the specific primer that we use for our restorations. We did run out of primer in August, and we had to wait about a month until we could acquire more, so there was a dropoff in the number of new products that we could post for sale in August-September. Even now, we haven’t posted many new products in a while, but that’s because we’ve been busy spraying primer and topcoats of paint. We hope to maintain a more regular “new arrival” parade through the fall and winter.

We were able to maintain a regular shipping schedule through the first wave of the pandemic, although there was a postal backlog in the spring. We expect that our mode of shipping will continue the status quo. Our costs have risen slightly, but we are choosing to absorb them for now.

As always, we are receptive to acquiring raw stock suitable for restoration. If you have rusty-but-intact pairs of Ontario plates up to 1969, feel free to contact us.

Thanks for visiting, and here’s hoping for a few more nice weeks of classic car cruising season!