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Looked for this high and low, and I can't find any good references or examples! Does anyone know what the original, service bridging plates looked like? I cannot find a single picture of such a thing, quite possibly because I don't read or write German...

I do speak German, but I don't understand the term " bridging plates"...

Please explain, and I'll try to help

Certainly on British military vehicles (and I assume the Brit Pinz) the bridging plate is a yellow disk on the front of the vehicle that has two symbols on it - one symbol gives the speed and the other gives the weight - sometimes only the weight symbol is displayed.

Bridges have different load ratings and the number on the front of the vehicle on its bridging plate indicates whether a mil vehicle can drive over the bridge.

I cannot find a pic of one on the front of a Pinz but here are some general pics. https://www.google.com.au/search?q=mili ... BVcQsAQIGg

I am not sure if military vehicles in Austrian service had them but certainly US, UK and Aust vehicles do.

My 101 - the yellow plate


Garry

I do not remember a sign indicating brigde weight info on any of the Austrian Army Pinzgauers.
They have white spraypointed tactical signs indicating service groups, location ...

The British army have stopped using bridging plates, no British Pinz has ever been fitted with one.

Hmm, well what was originally fitted on the bridging plate area, then? I find it hard to believe that it was left as a shiny silver piece of metal, and it surely wasn't the red and white swiss army flags that some people like to put on theirs.

This is surprisingly hard to find info on.

on the front they have the license plate on the driver side



and the rear side never had any plates next to the door handle

unipus wrote:Hmm, well what was originally fitted on the bridging plate area, then? I find it hard to believe that it was left as a shiny silver piece of metal, and it surely wasn't the red and white swiss army flags that some people like to put on theirs.

This is surprisingly hard to find info on.

The "shiny silver piece of metal" was used in the Swiss army to add a 3-letter/1-digit code that indicated what unit the vehicle was attributed to. The whole Swiss army is organised as a militia (except a core of officers and instructors) and each unit entering a training "session" would be attributed vehicles from a pool, i.e. the first task of the designated driver was to add unit-specific codes to the plate with stencils and paint, and the last thing would be to erase it with gasoline (hence the reason why it was left bare). One vehicle could be with an air defense unit one week and infantry the next, and so on...

The way these plates were used in the Swiss army never had anything to do with markings related to vehicle characteristics, like weight class.

From the pics above posted by Hotzenplotz of an Austrian Army vehicle, it seems the austrians have (permanent?) unit markings directly on the truck's body.