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Show 1950 License Plates Readied At State Prison Inmates at the state prison in Sugar House are busy this week turning out brand new 1950 auto license plates. Lights will be burning late in the prison plate shop from now on until the shop's annual output out-put of 250,000 pairs of license plates is boxed and on its way to the state's auto owners. 194,000 Passenger Cars Plates are expected to be ready for sale Dec. 15, according accord-ing to the State Tax Commission. Commis-sion. Judging by plates sold so far this year, the 1950 market should include about 194,000 passenger cars, 45,072 trucks, ! 1165 buses, 1631 trailers and semi-trailers and 1851 motorcycles. motor-cycles. With that, heavy demand in mind, prison officials boosted the plate shop's daily output from 2400 to 4000 pairs Monday, Mon-day, as the 60 prisoner-workers began putting in longer hours. Those 8000 plates a day rep- resent a lot of work. Each plate goes through nine separate operations, op-erations, not counting loading and handling. Start As Sheets of Steel The 250,000 plates, for which motorists and truckers will pay from $5 to $440 a pair, start out in the plate shop as sheets of rolled Steel, eight feet long, , three feet wide. Whacking them up into plate-size plate-size sheets is the first step. Then the "blanks" are put one by one through a punching machine ma-chine which rounds the corners and punches out the bolt-holes. Next, in two operations, the figures and "Utah 1950" are stamped out. Plates then go into a black enamel paint bath and are baked, 160 pairs at a time, in walk-in oven, an hour at 250 degrees. Out they go and through a roller coating machine which smears paint orange paint this year across the raised letters and numbers. Then back into the oven for another baking, the last step, except for packing and shipping. And for that, auto drivers will pay $5 a pair and truck operators opera-tors will shell out up to $440 a pair, depending on size of the vehicle. Taxes are not included in-cluded in that price, of course. W. P. Van Fleet, officer in charge of the shop, figures the labor of prisoners in the plate shop saves the state's taxpayers about $20,000 a year. Most of that comes from the State Tax Commission, for the auto plate production. Other good customers cus-tomers are the State Highway Commission and city street departments, de-partments, who buy highway and street signs turned out in i the plate shop. |