Featured Cat Herding

In my state you can have the engraving done for free. The state has contracted with Jiffy Lube outlets. I drove to one of them, they put my VIN in a computer (I had it written down in advance to hand to them, thinking it would save them time, but they just used a bar code scanner on the door jamb sticker, even faster) and then I pulled forward over their service pit.

There was a quick sound like an old Centronics printer in a bathtub and then they sent me on my way. When I crawled under the car later, there was the number, stamped in nice dot-matrix figures. Seems they just used a handheld dot peen tool hooked up to their computer. So between the barcode scanning and the dot peen tool, I was barely there a couple of minutes.

They also sprayed some high-temp yellow paint on the cat, which is apparently supposed to mean "hey doofus! this one is engraved."

 

Engraving VINs will work on cats just like the etching the VINs on windows works around here.

 

Like a "please don't bring a gun into this gun free zone sign"?

 

One thing about Engraving, is that unscrupulous folks can grind It Off most of the time. Number stamps or an electrical etching might be a better way to go.
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Like everybody knows you can't bring a gun into the airport, yet TSA had over 6,000 people attempt to bring them in their carry-ons onto an aircraft last year (a record BTW). 88% were loaded. And there are signs everywhere including on your ticket you print out.

 

I’ve read that at least in part, any sort of applying ID marking is not so much for individual deterrent, more for “the greater good”: making it easier to prosecute. Say if a fence is caught with a whole mess of cats with ID’s, hard to plead ignorance. And confirmation that recovered cats are stolen is easier, since owners can be tracked down.

 

What I've got trouble wrapping my head around is the number of posters here who report buying used engines that show up with the VIN plate removed, and who report the used-engine vendor cheerfully, openly saying "oh yeah, we always remove those", and trying to square that with what I find in any quick google search on the subject, where I keep reading (as I would have naïvely expected) that there's never a good or innocent reason to do that.

 

Along with that, grinding off etching isn't a markless exercise. Can't be traced back to specific car, and not easy to prove wasn't stolen.

 

The state-subsidized dot peening here is accompanied by a generous, sort of expressionist, spray of heat-resistant yellow paint. So there's also the chore of removing that.

 

Not the Toyota part number, but I think those are codes you find inscribed on the cat.