Winter alloy centre caps, Plan B.
As I mentioned earlier, I bought cheap 16" Boavista lookalikes to use as my winter alloys. While the wheel itself is moderately OEM looking, its 'Rundo' centre cap certainly isn't. It's extremely bland, really letting down the design:
Plan A was to get suitable original VW centre caps to fit instead of those 'Rundo' caps. Easier said than done! The diameter of the centre cap recess in the wheel is 60mm, and VW currently don't seem to have a cap in that size available. Another problem stems from the depth of the recess:
The recess is over 7mm deep so that's also the required thickness of the cap. You can fit a shallower cap, but it won't look right:
I searched the net and ebay for hours, and while there are several 60mm centre caps or centre cap stickers available for VW, none seemed to be thick enough. From
passatplus.de I found a part number for an original VW 60mm centre cap (3B9 071 214 666), but that seemed to be a discontinued item. Went to my local VW parts dealer anyway, and surprisingly they were able to trace down three NOS caps from various dealers in Finland. I bought them, only to realise they too were too shallow...
I had also bought some pressed aluminium VW stickers (flat surface) I thought I'd simply stick over the Rundo caps. This would have been relatively easy, but on trial fit with some double-sided tape it soon became clear that, being flat, the sticker didn't look very OEM. Current VW caps are fairly domed, and I wanted that look.
Then I ordered some slightly domed caps through ebay from a Bulgarian seller. They were 60mm again, and again I could already see from the pictures they were too shallow. But I already had my Plan B forming in my mind...
By this time I had a fairly presentable collection of centrecapobilia:
Front row l->r: Rundo cap | flat VW OEM cap (3B9 071 214 666) | flat pressed aluminium sticker
Back row l->r: domed cap from my RS6 replicas | spare cap without logo for the RS6 replicas | domed cap ordered from Bulgaria
Let's have a closer look at the Bulgarian-sourced cap:
The cap is obviously yet again too shallow, but what if....
Let's take one Bulgarian-sourced cap and hack off it's feet:
Then take the RS6 spare cap and push it in place:
Trial-fit the modified Bulgarian one (well, originally Chinese I'd guess...) over the RS6 one:
And we have a winner! The protrusion and doming looks convincingly OEM, doesn't it?
Let's go about securing the two together. First I roughened both surfaces to be joined together, followed by degreasing:
Then mix some Araldit epoxy glue with hardener:
Then apply the glue and leave to cure:
Tomorrow the glue will have cured and I can remove the 'bandages' to see how the operation went. For those of you
ing that 'He's permanently glued his centre cap to his wheel!": no I haven't. Just the one cap to the one beneath.