Repairing Remote Mirrors

[MIPS]

I let someone else drive my car while I was away a few weeks ago and when I came back I found that they assumed I had a manual mirror on the drivers side and had pushed on the mirror to adjust it. The plastic back for the mirror anchors the three control wires and one of them got pulled through so now my mirror cannot be adjusted properly.

The TSM does not tell you how to take this apart because it seems the mirror, housing and control are replaced as a single unit. You can't separate the pivot plate from the housing because when the mirror is glued in it covers the access holes for the screws. I was able to compress the large spring in the control stick assembly, remove the stakes and release the three wires from the control and that gives you just enough slack to pull the mirror out enough to rotate it 90 degrees and access the screws but I can't get the wire to stay back in the hole where it should anchor behind the mirror. You can't access it from the front because the mirror is glued over where the wire was originally fed through and crimped at the end so I instead I tried putting the wire and anchor back in and melting plastic over the hole. That held for a few weeks but this weekend I go back out to the car and see the anchor again pulled out of the plate and is stuck angled up at the sky. I could use an epoxy or a hot glue but seeing how all three wires do move freely in their anchor points I'm not sure if firmly securing them in place is the right way to do this. There is also very little space between the backing plate and the pivot so extra brackets and plates cannot be used. Also getting it apart is a massive pain. The first time around it took almost two hours to carefully get it all dismantled.

Replacement assemblies seem scarce. There is one on ebay right now but the first thing I see is the mirror assembly is detached from the housing. That I can tell you cannot do that without separating the wires and because those are anchored in BEFORE the mirror is fitted either this has a broken plate as well or broken wires. All the aftermarket mirrors look like junk.

[MIPS]

Supplement photos.





So the way the bit of melted plastic fell out tells me things jsut didn't get hot enough, so I'm wondering if a hotter iron and more plastic might work after I degrease the area.

[MIPS]

We'll see what this does.



Mixed some JB weld and let it sit until it was more of a putty, then fed the wire through and packed the hole with the JB weld. The wire is no longer free-moving but we'll see if that's an issue.