Defendoor Fuel Filler Cover

[adam300Tdi90]

I have modified my 90 TD5 tub to have the 300tdi fuel filler as well. Does anyone know if the defendoor cover will fit in the front 300tdi fuel recess as well as the TD5 rear mount recess?

[simonb]

My 90 300TDi tub has a square aperature for the fuel filler not the rounded top shown on your link....

[western]

only for the rounded top fill recess IIRC, you could e.mail them & request they add a cover suitable for the squarer recess to the range.

[adam300Tdi90]

only for the rounded top fill recess IIRC, you could e.mail them & request they add a cover suitable for the squarer recess to the range.

Emailed twice, . I didn't even ask if they would expand their range. Just simply asked the same question as above. My third email was "Hello?? Money waiting....???"

[teaandbiscuits]

how long did you give them to reply? i would always give a few days before sending again, not everyone sits waiting for emails.

i've just bought some stuff from them and mark was extremely helpful and polite on his email.

[Dads Toy]

I bought their speaker housings and they were very good with all my daft questions. Replied to e-mails quickly and when they arrived they fitted perfectly.

Malcolm

[kingrat]

I bet that is where Bolt on Bits are getting em from, and adding a markup

[adam300Tdi90]

I have just recieved a response from Mark, so huge apologies for implying his was a non-responsive company. I was simply stating the facts.

I am waiting for him to confirm that I can post his response publically. However, he states that is that he is indeed currently tooling up for the different shape (300tdi front mount) filler cover, and to his credit, there are many hurdles that he is managing to overcome, without any compromise on the materials or design.

As a potential consumer of this new product I am very grateful that he is developing on new ideas and of course taking the risk in this development. He is a credit to small business.

[adam300Tdi90]

Mark Shelly's reply (after he confirmed it was ok to post publically):

Hi Adam,

We are still working on the tool and it's coming along rather well. It is actually a four part tool with intricate vacuum and cooling lines which took a total of about 60 CNC milling hours. We are basically finished except for the etching on the front plate to give it a lightly structured embossing. The front plate is in Prague for etching and should be back by the beginning of next week however the forming machine isn't free for another until around the 15th of this month.

I do have a couple other slight obstacles at the same time -

• This is the first version of the tool. We have good data for our other tool and have done everything possible to make it right. The other tool however took 3 tries before we got it right. We use a soft, flexible and flame resistant material LDPE-FR. This material has a forming shrinkage of between 1.8% and 4% depending on the forming temperature. We built the tool exactly 3% larger than the finished product and hope to regulate the forming temperature with the rate and temperature of the coolant running throughout the tool. If we have to rebuild the tool it will be another 40 or so hours of work.

• A second obstacle would be the material itself. This is indeed a special material and has a minimum order of 10 tons to get any decent price -that's about 20,000 Euros. We bought 10 tons for the first covers and finished nearly 12,000 pieces - so it is worth the investment. At the moment however I only have 50 KG as sample material. Depending on how easy the initial set-up is, determines how many covers we can get from the initial run. I figure that we will get between 20 and 50, these would only be for sampling.

We will need to test the covers on as many vehicles as possible to determine that they are properly sized. Once they look good I will go ahead and order the material. We have to be careful with large amounts of material as the last couple tons we had in storage soaked up water from the air and I was forced to take them 60 km and pay to have them in an oven for 3 days.

So, if everything works out, you will have the first covers by the end of this month - on the other hand, if we have to rework the tooling it could take another month.

I'll let you know when we have some info. Thanks for your patience and have a good day. Mark

[adam300Tdi90]

So as you can see Mark is a very nice guy, who is really on the ball when it comes to his business and his products.

[teaandbiscuits]

glad his business is going well. just got mine today, as well as some rear speaker housings. all good stuff :-)

best of luck for the future mark! (if he sees this!)

[western]

Excellent, it was worth asking & waiting, hope the production goes well.