Mike Bender never considered himself a handy guy, but plenty of his handiwork adorns the walls of homes and offices throughout the region, and more every month.
The former Princeton police sergeant “never in a million years thought” that he would someday work as a professional artist, traveling to town fairs and craft shows to display and sell his wares. He never thought he’d walk into a high-end retail store and see things for sale that he had made. But all of that has come to pass and more.
Bender had a booth at the Hopewell Harvest Fair, held at Hopewell Elementary School on Sept. 24, where he showed off his one-of-a-kind creations: decorative signs made out of decommissioned license plates. He cuts the letters from the plates in strips and uses them to spell a word or words, like HOPEWELL or SEAS1DE HE1GHTS. He calls his business State Plate Signs, and since starting up in 2013, he estimates he’s sold some 400 items.
Bender, 51, retired from the Princeton Police in 2013, after 25 years on the job. He remembers being in Lambertville not long after retiring and seeing a sign on the wall of a boutique that was made from license plates. The sign, in his estimation, had been poorly made.
Bender wasn’t a craftsman, but he believed he could do better. And he just happened to be the sort of person who collects things. Things like license plates. He had about 50 or so in his home in Hopewell.
He went to work in his home workshop, cutting plates from his collection using an angle grinder and a vise. In the beginning, he said in a recent interview, he didn’t really know how to make the cuts nice and clean. The grinder wasn’t the right tool for the job. The cuts were rougher than he would have liked.
But he finished his first sign, and not long afterward, someone offered to buy it. “I realized that my sign really was a better sign,” he said. He’s been at work perfecting his technique ever since.
Before the signs, there were other projects for Bender. He started out making clocks out of circular saw blades and bike cranks, or bowls out of vinyl records. “People didn’t like that stuff as much as they like the signs,” he said. “When the signs really took off, all the other things went by the wayside.”
He abandoned the angle grinder for a throatless hand shear, which allowed him to make clean, straight, almost seamless cuts. At first, he would mount assembled signs on ordinary pieces of wood that he stained or painted. But a friend of his who is a general contractor had a supply of reclaimed barnwood that he was using to build a house, and gave Bender the pieces he didn’t need to use as mounts. The barn, built in 1875, had stood in Michigan. “I made him a nice sign to thank him,” Bender said.
He makes other things out of plates besides signs. He has a template for a five-pointed star made out of bent plates, and he also makes birdhouses, boxes, keychains and pendants. Examples of all his designs can be found on his website or on his Instagram account (stateplatesigns).
But the majority of Bender’s pieces are signs spelling out words or phrases. The names of beach towns are popular choices with customers, as are first or last names and words like “peace” and “thankful.” Though his pieces are available in stores like Twine in Hopewell, Chance on Main in Pennington and The Farmhouse Store in Princeton, the majority of his work is by commission, with most orders made by email (stateplatesigns@gmail.com).
One of his most popular designs is his Thin Blue Line series, which is intended for police officers. Bender mounts a plate design on a carefully painted piece of wood featuring the Thin Blue Line symbol. Many of these feature a police force abbreviation — like NYPD or NJSP — followed by a badge number, but like most of Bender’s designs, these too can be customized.
Facebook has been an important marketing platform in the early days of State Plate Signs. Particularly crucial is a Facebook group for wives of New Jersey State Troopers. One day, the wife of a trooper who had bought a sign from Bender posted a picture on the wives’ Facebook page. Within a day, he had 18 new orders, and since then, he’s made more than 130 state police signs all told.
One difficulty for Bender is maintaining an inventory of plates that he can use in making signs. He has about a thousand now, most of them Jersey plates, but says he’d like to have a collection of ten thousand or more. He has relationships with several salvage yards, who he says only agree to give him the plates they salvage because they know he will use them for art, and not for anything illegal.
“That’s a genuine concern,” he said. He brings a cutter with him when he visits the yards. If they want him to cut the plates up in front of them, to ensure that he can’t use them intact on stolen cars, he does.
Another interesting challenge for Bender has to do with the letter I. In recent years, no standard New Jersey plate has included the letter, which can be confused with the number 1. If he wants an I for a Jersey plate design, he has to come across a decommissioned vanity plate, or use an older plate. Plates from the buff-and-blue era and back do have I’s. If he can’t find enough I’s, he uses 1’s in their place. “Some people have a problem with that,” he said. “Most don’t.”
Bender was born and raised in Princeton, where his mother, Rogie Rome, still lives. His father, Stephen Bender, now lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Stephen Bender was a dentist in Princeton for more than 40 years.
Bender has lived in Hopewell with his family for 21 years. He and wife Charlie have four children: Victoria, 27; Tyler, 23; Liz, 17; and Katharine (“Kitty”), who is in eighth grade at Timberlane Middle School.
While things are going well, State Plate Signs remains a nights-and-weekends enterprise for now. Bender has worked a variety of day jobs since retiring from the Princeton Police. He keeps so busy to help pay for daughter Kitty’s medical expenses. Kitty has Type I diabetes, and Bender says the family’s out-of-pocket health-care costs exceed $1000 a month. Kitty is the first student in the Hopewell Valley Regional School District to have a service dog with her during the school day. Her dog, Pandora, can detect when her blood sugar is high or low by the smell of her breath.
Bender says he is content with the pieces he’s currently making and is not looking to expand his offerings any time soon. He’s been working with someone on a prototype design using Computer Numeric Control, or CNC, but says that’s for down the road.
What he wants more than anything is a larger selection of plates to choose from. “That would make my life a lot easier,” he said.
He’ll be at the Allentown, New Jersey Fall Festival Oct. 8 and 9, and can often be found at the Golden Nugget Flea Market in Titusville, which, he says, is a great place to spend a Sunday afternoon.
Mike Bender of State Plate Signs at the Hopewell Harvest Fair, held at Hopewell Elementary School Sept. 24, 2016. (Photo by Suzette J. Lucas.),
