Alternative solution to the bonnet shut problem?

[MissMoppet]

Yesterday I spent a frustrating four hours freeing the bonnet shut splitter box situation that many of you will have encountered. Four hours because the wretched splitter box had been double cable tied to the frame - not by me - and when eventually freed one of the twin cables disappeared towards the headlights. Fortunately I had a surgical scalpel to hand that by dint of careful if blind handling I managed to slice through the ties and avoid removing any of my finger tips at the same time. But to retrieve the lost cable I had to poke and fish with a bent wire through another hole, and by some fluke managed to snag and pull it through.
For those who have yet to experience this delight, you have to remove the inner wheel arch liner and slide your fingers - not your hand, no room - up through a narrow slot to then play around with a variety of screwdrivers - and in my case a scalpel - to dislodge the splitter box.
However, reading back the 20 year old Forum posts on here, the solution then was to simply remove the headlight inspection hatch then the washer bottle neck which probably made the job a right doddle as I'm sure you could get most of your arm and hand up there.
So to reach the point of this thread, the bottle is a two part mould but mine and I suspect every other R75 still running, has now fused the bottle into one whole. Has anyone tried to separate them, maybe with a heat-gun? I can't believe that the original Rover designers didn't think this wasn't the solution and it must surely be quite by accident that there is this slender gap just about available to release the box.
If a heat-gun will work then I am tempted to separate them and replace with some appropriate grease that will avoid it ever happening again. In my situation it very nearly became impossible without resorting to serious mechanical destruction: in any event four hours with a main dealer would have been £400 and upwards - an absurd penalty for what basically is a trivial problem.

[Arctic]

Hi Dave.
The top part of the washer bottle is similar to a light bulb bayonet, so it turns to remove it, you may have known that already? a good idea is to wrap a couple of cable ties around the cables and let the long tail trail down behind the hatch so in future you can just pull on the cables.

[MissMoppet]

Originally Posted by Arctic

Hi Dave.
The top part of the washer bottle is similar to a light bulb bayonet, so it turns to remove it, you may have known that already?

No Steve I didn't know that: I just couldn't budge it at all so presume it had become welded as one through the ages. If so . . . then why have successive R75 owners scraped and fumed in trying to squeeze our tender fingers through that gap? Masochism?
I shall rush out now and see if I can move it.

[MissMoppet]

As a postscript to the above I've just fitted new splitter boxes to both my R75s (Rimmer Bros = £20 inc post). For those who've never fitted new boxes the novelty of having both lugs intact makes it an extremely tight fit: it's not going to spring off any time soon. While that's comforting to know it does reinforce Steve's advice to loop a stout cable tie round each end with the tails hanging down through the finger wide gap that theoretically provides something to yank down in the unhappy event of a malfunction.

[Arctic]

Originally Posted by MissMoppet

As a postscript to the above I've just fitted new splitter boxes to both my R75s (Rimmer Bros = £20 inc post). For those who've never fitted new boxes the novelty of having both lugs intact makes it an extremely tight fit: it's not going to spring off any time soon. While that'

An idea put forward and shown to me by my fellow Crew member Scott