Possible rover 75 tourer/mg ztt rear screen re-manufacture!

[Rick-sta]

Hi all, I just wanted to put this out just to get a feel for any interest there may be in this. As some of you may have seen, I recently had a batch of 26 brand new heated front windscreens manufactured for the 75/ZT, and whilst I was offering those I was asked by quite a few tourer owners if it would be possible for the manufacturer to produce new tailgate glass screens for the tourer models.

As some of you may already know, brand new rear screens for the tourer models are no longer available and haven't been available for some time, so this means that if your rear screen is smashed or in need of replacement and you go through your insurance or to any windscreen fitter such as autoglass or national windscreens, they aren't able to supply you with a brand new rear screen, they are all out of stock.

Therefore your only option in this case is to find a second hand one from a breaker, which of course isn't too much of a problem at the moment. However I was mostly asked if I'd be able to have new ones made due to the heater elements failing on the rear screens.

Well I've been chatting to the guys I used to have the front windscreens made, and what I didn't realise was that the manufacturer they use is actually one of the mainstream manufacturers/suppliers for most cars and currently hold the contract for the heated windscreens for Ford (can't remember their name), and their catalogue consists of windscreens, rear screens and side windows for most cars including ones for MG Rover which they apparently supplied back when our cars were being produced. Hence why the quality of the heated windscreens I had made are so good.

The guys have got in touch with the manufacturer and they have come back to us and said they have the design for the tourer rear screen, however when they sent us the design it looks like it's the saloon rear screen rather than the tourer one. It's taking quite a bit of digging into to find the correct design as unfortunately their catalogue doesn't run off the same part numbers as the ones we have. But we think they do have the design somewhere!

So what I wanted to do was just get a feel for how much interest there would be in brand new rear tourer screens as they guys are having to put quite a bit of time into this to see if we can have them made. If there's not much interest then I'll tell them to stop looking into it.

I've been told we'll probably be looking at a minimum order of 10 rear screens, and price wise they've estimated they'll be between £150-£250ish, but we can't give an exact price yet until the manufacturer is able to find the correct design and able to provide us with a quote.

If this does go ahead, the rear screens will be made to match the quality of the original factory rear screens, and will be exactly the same so will have the heater elements and aerials all built into the rear screen.

So just to get a feel, would there be much interest in these?

Cheers (y)