I swung out too far on a left turn last week, and I knocked the mirror off on a trashcan. I ordered a replacement from eBay, took the inside door panel off, unscrewed the old one, screwed the new one in, and put the door panel back together.
I was surprised how uncomplicated replacing those turned out to be. I was really expecting to never be able to get the door panel back on, but it wasn’t that bad
I’m tempted to add sound deadening to my car interior, but my fear of door panels has stopped me.
I’ve even worked on a BMW door panel and they’re not the worst. Most difficulty is in dealing with the inevitable clips that you’ll probably need to replace a couple of and the black pasty goo they use to stick the plastic on the door.
I’m guessing it’s more difficult if you have power running to the mirror.
Even thats not that bad, on my car with power mirrors it was a cable that had a plug inside the frame of the door under the door card with a connector.
I swapped the mirror clamshell and new glass onto the mechanism of the broken one and everything was fine.
i ended up replacing the mirrors of several other people who were putting off getting new ones, and the powered ones were slightly more complicated, but still not terrible
It was a simple plug.
It’s pretty trivial. After my friend was hit by a deer, we ordered the mirror and had it installed in about 20 minutes, including the time looking for a clip that popped.
i think most of the time was watching a youtube video of someone doing it to build up confidence
Ooh I did this last month too, after somebody accidentally smashed it off my parked car. To be fair, instead of driving off, she came to the house all flustered and I said “look, these things happen, it’s just a car” and although she offered to pay for it to go to a garage, I thought I’d have a crack at it myself. Got a generic replacement from eBay, but the most frustrating part for me after finally getting the door card and the interior trim off, was finding that the bolts that attached the mirror unit to the A pillar were some weird-looking things I’d never seen before.
I’m no mechanic, so I took the car to Halfords and said “I need a bit for this bolt but I have no idea what it is”. The guy came out to look at it and said “Yeah, not sure if we’ll have something for that”. Then he went, “Actually, maybe we do” and I followed him to the back of the shop where they were selling this huge toolkit for about £1k, and he went through it and found the right bit, in amongst the hundred other tools in this box.
I said “I don’t suppose you sell this separately!?” and he laughed and said, “No, but come to the till”.
We wander off to the till and he goes “Do you want to buy these microfibre cloths for £2.99?”. I’m thinking, what the fuck is he on about, and he must have read my face, smiles and goes “You do”. So I say yes, and he wraps up the bit in the microfibre cloth and hands it over.
What an absolute fucking star of a man.
Anyway just as a bonus, after spray painting the mirror cover (the eBay one was just a primed thing), I message the woman to say all sorted, and she asked me how much it cost and I said about £70 for the mirror unit, bit, and spray paint, and the next day she knocked on the door with an envelope with £150 in it “for my time” and a card that said “Thanks for being so nice about it all”.
10/10 would let her smash my mirrors again.
You missed the opportunity, it was right there!
“10/10 would smash again.” 🤣
Haha I deliberately added “my mirrors” to that sentence. It was too much like low hanging fruit for me.
I’m getting old, so my fruit is already hanging low.
HEY-O!!
Absolut chad. Aliexpress should have you covered next time, if you can wait a week or two.
Respect. Once tried to remove the door card in my ancient but trustworthy honda. Only managed to break absolutely all the crumbly plastic bits. #shouldntvedunnit
Nice, good work. What management doesn’t know won’t hurt them.
Are you on the A-Team?
“…if you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find me, maybe you can hire… the B-Team.” Cue dramatic march that has just a few missed notes.
