Vehicle Date Reminder (Tax / MoT / Insurance / Servicing)

Here in the UK, as of 01/10/14 we no longer have to display road tax in our windscreen.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/vehicle-tax-changes

This is due to everything being on computer systems now.

There are many benefits to this; not wasting paper to print them, not wasting envelopes to post them, not wasting money to print/post them, not having to wait for them to turn up, not having to go and collect them.

But then on the flip side, what am I going to check when I want to know when my road tax runs out!?! Will I go online? Will I look through all my paperwork? It used to be that I would just look at my windscreen!

I wanted a simple replacement for the humble paper tax disc...

Date Made: October 2014
Approx Cost: £0.50
Approx Time: 10 minutes
Difficulty: Easy

I thought that seeing as I would now have a redundant place where the tax disc once was, I was best to utilize that space.

What better way to fill it, than with a replacement tax disc of my own.

That way I could put what ever information I wanted on there; not only the date of my tax renewal, but the date of all the other things I forget - MoT, insurance, servicing!

I set about my design.

The tax disc has been around for 93 years, so has had a few different looks, but always remained a 75mm disc.

I looked through various old styles, and I liked the ones from the 1920s to 1940s. I used that framing as my basis.

I used the 'Waves' and colouring from a modern tax disc though.

The early style design lent itself towards having 4 sectors, one for each date I needed to remember. I put blank boxes in so that the date could be written in, and left a gap for any other notes that were needed.

I started to design my template in Autocad. But it doesn't deal with circular text very well, so I tried some other options.

Next I tried to use paint.net, but found that it wasn't very good for measuring and accuracy.

Finally I decided to use PowerPoint. An unusual choice, but it dealt with the lines, waves, colours and circular text well. Alignment takes a bit of getting used to, but it kind of works!

The PowerPoint file is attached here, so that you can alter the template to suit your own needs, or even just change the colour so that it co-ordinates with your car!?!

If you are happy with the design, then there is a pdf attached here which can just be printed and used straight away. The file is designed to be printed on A4 at 1:1 or 100%.

The template can be printed out, cut out, filled in and put in the place of your old tax disc.

Alternatively, if you wanted to use your tax disc holder for a parking permit or something else, you could turn your tax disc holder in to the reminder, by affixing it to the rear.

Some Future improvements that I could think of:

* make a whiteboard version so that you can re-write and re-use. Laminating the disc and using a CD/whiteboard pen would be an easy way to do this.
* make a "dial" version where you can set the dates by turning a dial, hence being able to re-use.
* make a digital version with an alarm 2 weeks before the date?

Some pictures taken from google to inspire thought!