Frame vs bracket vs adapter

Search for a way to put a plate on the front of your car and you will get three different parts returned under the same words. People order a "license plate bracket" and receive a decorative surround. People order a "frame" and find it has nothing to bolt to. Here is the distinction, once, in plain language.

Frame

A frame is the decorative surround. It sits between the plate and the bumper, bolts through mounting holes the car already has, and uses the same two bolts that hold the plate on. It adds no mounting points and no structure. If your car already takes an ordinary frame from an auto parts shop, it takes any other frame with the same footprint.

Standard North American frames use a footprint of roughly 324.8 × 172.4 mm around a 12″ × 6″ plate, with mounting holes at 120.65 mm spacing. Nearly every frame sold in Canada or the US uses that pattern, so "will it fit" is almost always a question about your car's holes, not about the frame.

This is what Konbini Plate makes.

Bracket

A bracket creates mounting holes where the car has none. That is the whole job. The classic case is a Japanese import whose front bumper was never drilled for a North American plate, but it also comes up on cars with a smooth aero bumper, an aftermarket lip, or a tow-eye-only front end.

The common types:

• Tow-hook bracket — threads into the factory front tow eye behind the pop-out panel in the bumper. No drilling. Puts the plate slightly off-centre and proud of the bumper. Thread pitch is car-specific; M16×1.5 is the most common on Japanese cars but it is not universal.
• No-drill bumper bracket — tabs tuck behind the grille or into a bumper seam, held by existing fasteners. Tidier and centred, but fitment is model-specific.
• Drill-in bracket or plain drilling — two holes in the bumper skin. Permanent, and the right answer only if you are certain.

Adapter

An adapter converts one bolt pattern into another, or moves the plate somewhere else. Two versions come up constantly:

• Pattern adapter — JDM plate hole spacing to the North American 120.65 mm pattern, or a euro plate to a North American plate holder. A thin plate with two sets of holes.
• Relocation kit — moves the plate off-centre, to the bumper's side, or down to a lower valance. Worth knowing that in British Columbia a plate has to stay flat, upright and plainly readable, so an angled side-mount is the kind that attracts a second look from an officer.

How they stack

They are not alternatives to each other. They go in a sequence, and you only need the parts your car actually lacks:

1. Bracket — only if the car has no mounting holes at all.
2. Adapter — only if the holes you have are the wrong pattern.
3. Plate — bolted to whatever the first two steps produced.
4. Frame — optional, last, on top.

What we sell, and what we don't

Konbini Plate makes frames. We do not sell brackets or adapters, and we would rather say so before you order than after. If your import has no front plate holes, buy a tow-hook bracket sized to your car's thread pitch first — there is a longer walkthrough in front plate on a JDM import in BC — and the frame bolts on once that is fitted.

Our frame is drawn as a solid model and printed in PETG in British Columbia, with the colour printed 0.60 mm into the face rather than applied as a decal. Standard footprint, standard 120.65 mm holes, uses your existing plate bolts.