Anodized aluminum fasteners are a great way to add a pop of color to your motorcycle, powersports vehicle, or even your car or truck (if you want). As long as they're the correct measurements and strength to fit your application, they can be a cool little detail to spice up your ride without a whole lot of effort. Maybe you've already done this before, or you know someone who has. I certainly have; I have some sweet little red ones holding the carbon fiber flyscreen in place on my Hawk, because the bike is red and the carbon fiber is clear-coated black. They look pretty good, I think!
But these new fasteners from Japanese aftermarket parts specialist Kijima are a whole new dimension of adorable, particularly if you're a cat person. That's Kijima with a 'Ki,' not 'Kojima,' although apparently Hideo Kojima is also very much a cat person, you may be thrilled to learn.
Kijima has dubbed them "Nyanba Bolts," and they come in a nice, standard M6 x 15 size, meant specifically for your license plate, and not intended for any load-bearing use. They come in single packs of whichever color you choose (there are multiple options, as you can see), and they come with the anodized cat-head aluminum bolt in your favorite color, as well as all the hardware you need to use them on your license plate. For the record, that's the bolt, a nut, a flat washer, and a spring washer.
The color names Kijima has used for the different options are pretty great, too. Choose from "paw pad pink," "brown tabby orange," and even "Hachiware gray." If the M6 x 15 is too short for you, they also offer LONG Nyanba bolts which are M6 x 23, for only a little bit more money!
Now, I'll break one of my own personal rules and explain a joke (sorry) so that if you don't already know, you'll maybe learn something today. For those unfamiliar, "nyan" is the romanized form of the Japanese onomatopoeia for the sound a cat makes. In English, we frequently characterize this as "meow," but in Japanese, it's "nyan." And of course, if you sound "nyanba" out, it's a bit of a bilingual pun, because it sounds like "number," as in how our UK friends refer to a license plate as a "number plate."
If you're interested in obtaining one of these to decorate your license plate, they're around US $8 at the time of writing. The long Nyanba bolts are a slightly over a dollar more expensive. You can find both at Webike, and they ship to a lot of international places if you find that you simply can't resist the cute.
See how cute your license plate could look? It doesn't seem like they're offering different animals yet, so if you're a dog person, rabbit person, turtle person, or some other type of animal companion, you may unfortunately be out of luck at the moment. I've personally met a bunch of animal people who ride, so here's hoping for a range of small, cute, decent-quality decorative bolts for the rest of us very soon. It might be a small thing, but much like stickers or remembering the hot sauce, sometimes it can make a disproportionately big difference to how good of a day you end up having, no?
