I mentioned in the "What did you do to your Triton today" thread that I fitted a set of seals to my tailgate to limit dust and water ingress into the tub. A couple of people were interested in seeing how I did it, so here are the details.......
When I first purchased my Triton from the dealer back in the beginning of 2013 I had intended to have a canopy installed and as such I ordered the Genuine Mitsubishi Water Defender Kit at the time, then changed my mind and decided against a canopy (after reading bad reviews on here about the genuine canopy).
So I had the Water Defender Kit sitting around for about a year and never opened it, advertised it on here with no interest and then more recently thought I would like to limit the amount of dust that enters the tub when offroad so I opened up the box and had a look at what was in the kit.
Wow - what an overpriced package of junk, well done Mitsubishi. The kit is basically two large plastic inserts that sit neatly in the rear corners of the tub liner and have a protruding edge with a seal on it that contacts the tailgate when closed to form a seal down the side edges. This kit is specifically designed for use with a genuine under rail tub liner I might note.
The rubber seals are adhered to the plastic by double sided tape, which was coming off all over the place. So I had to remove the seals and tape carefully before cleaning and reapplying new tape and old seals. But before this I did a test fit and determining that I would remove some of the plastic material that is dedicated to sealing against a genuine canopy. Some simple marking and a trim with a 1mm cutting disc had it looking like it was meant to be.
Now this kit is only designed to seal down the side and most of the dust enters from the bottom so I headed out to Clark Rubber to source a seal for the bottom. They had the perfect shape in stock. I didn't get a photo of the profile of it before installing it but basically it looks like an L with a slight curve to the upright part.
This new rubber seal for the bottom simply has the flat base section slid under the tub liner to hold it in place. It seals up nicely against the bottom of the tailgate when close and is low enough in profile that I can still slide items across the tailgate into the tray without contacting the seal.
Here are some photos.....
This one shows I only installed it with the 3 rear most rivets, I found this to be secure enough and was mindful that installing the 3 down the side of the tub would be a real pain because no matter how much force I used by hand I could not get the tub liner to sit against the tub wall, which meant I would have had no chance of getting a rivet to work. Even to get the face that you can see riveted in this pic to all sit flush I had to use a g-clamp when assembling it to keep the outer plastic, the tub liner and the tray body together (had to remove tail lights to facilitate this). Just the 3 large rivets in the pic seem to be adequate.
Here you can see the bottom seal and how it sits flush against the bottom of the tub liner.....
The passenger side......
Astute observers will note the upright seals don't run all the way to the top of the plastic. This is because the seals actually rest in a depression in the liner on the tail gate when closed and if you run it past the depression you can't close the tailgate.
I got to give the seals a good test the weekend after I installed them, I was second car in convoy for about 5 hours on some very dusty tracks. Ordinarily this would have meant all my gear in the tub would have been filthy with dust, usually more filthy than the outside of the car.
As you can see, the outside of the car is pretty dusty but inside the tray is basically spotless, I didn't have to clean any of the gear that was in the tub when I got home. It definitely worked very well