1976 Issued License Plates
This is the first year of regular issue for the islands of the Bahamas and plates were blue on yellow with wide bolt slots. Because of the wide slots, it is very common to find extra holes in the plates where they were mounted to the vehicle. At the end of 1976, plates were required to be turned back into the government. Several varieties exist from this issue.
US Made Plates
Plates issued in 1976 made in the United States were made in Oregon using the dies from 50's era Alaskan plates. These feature rounded corners and wide bolt slots.
Truck license plates had a "T" prefix stacked against the serial.
Motorcycle plates were around 6" wide and had a different numeric die set than the passenger plates. You can compare the "4" in the above Inagua plate with the "4" on the Spanish Wells passenger plate above to see the difference.
Most of these plates were painted back and front, but I have seen two plates that hand an unfinished back.
Island Made Plates
Replacement plates and additional plates were made in the Bahamas by the government. These were made using the U.S. supplied blanks consisting of pre-punched bolt slots, rounded corners, and a raised rim. These are not common by any means.
These are very easy to distinguish as the embossing applied by the government used a male-only die-press using the interchangeable rectangular dies for the serial, island name, and "Bahamas". You will notice the different spacing in the "Bahamas" between the plates. Additionally, the Nassau plate is roller-painted while the Cat Island and Eleuthera plates are hand-painted. The Eleuthera plate was not photographed crooked - it actually was fed into the press at an angle!
Although most government made plates used a roller to apply paint to the embossing, a small handful of plains that had hand-painted lettering are known.
The above Grand Bahama plate was made using the traditional male-only die-press, but The island name and Bahamas was applied with a square paint brush.
A small series of plates using 1976 blanks and painted with the older Out Islands color combination of white on green exist. The above Cat Island taxi plate is an example of such plate.
Miscellaneous
It's interesting to put a run of plates together to and see how the plates were issued to a given island. In this example, we can see that Spanish Wells probably had ordered 200 passenger plates from the U.S. manufacturer in 1976, at which point the government started making additional plates.
