OK - time to revive this thread yet again! I made some more progress assessing the viability of the machined timing advance cover, and things are looking good.
Before installing the '84 1.6lTD injection pump on dad's Rabbit 1.6lD, I took the opportunity to remove its timing advance cover and cold-start advance lever covers, and I took some piston travel measurements. Pushing on the back side of the piston to see how far out it would go, I found that by the time something inside the pump stopped it moving out, it reached a protrusion beyond the face of the cover of about 5mm! This means that the piston of the '84 1.6lTD pump in my Rabbit GTD autocrosser should be able to move freely out at high RPMs up to the full 3mm depth I had machined into the cover, with no internal pump modifications necessary to achieve the additional timing piston travel.
I also verified that the depth of the spring perch of the machined cover I have (which actually came from a mitsubishi pickup truck) matches the cover out of the '84 1.6lTD, and the spring perch looked functionally equivalent. So I should be able to bolt this thing right on and expect it to not mess up the enitre dynamic timing curve (at least not a whole lot.)
By the way, going from memory here, IIRC the full travel of the stock timing piston was about 7mm. And also IIRC, moiving the cold start advance lever moves the piston out by about 2mm. (All figures are accurate to only about .5mm, due to crappy inaccurate plastic measuring calipers I badly need to replace! :? ) This basically confirms that a 3mm increase in the travel of the timing advance piston is a significant amount - an increase of about 43%!
Also can take away from this, that if pulling the timing out is good for a 2000RPM change in dynamic timing, at 2mm change in timing piston, that would mean adding 3mm to the end if its travel would add an additional 3000RPM to revv before the mechanism reaches it's limit.
I know a lot of you guys have been anxiously awaiting to hear the results. So now, if I just could get the GTD motor starting reliably (and finish up other projects like dad's Rabbit turbo conversion :?), so I could move on to testing this.