These mirrors are a classic case. They retail for about $146 US so that is the best part of $200 in Kiwi cash. I picked them up for about a quarter of that. My gain this time I guess....but I'm sure my turn will come when I am the one on the losing end.
Anyway as many of you know, to say I like my gadgets is a bit of an understatement and in case you haven't already guessed from my blogs about the climate aircon......I intend to have a few mod cons on this rod.
So I decided the mirrors will be electric.
I have been scavenging at Pick a Part to try and find some nice small motors that will fit into these new side mirrors. The glass is only just over 2 inches tall at the widest point so they are fairly small and finding a motor that will fit inside this space has proven to be a real big ask.
I must have popped the glass out more than fifty different side mirrors before I came across something small enough.
In the end these mirrors from a Ford Focus have become the donors.
Now we are about to find out how an electric mirror works. I bet you have been laying awake at nights just wondering how they move in all directions at the touch of a button.
First I pop the mirror out.
As you can see it is just glued to a plastic backing and that plastic backing clips into a ring around the electric mirror motor. That's the motor you can see in the second picture above.
Here it is pulled out of the housing. It is held in place by 3 screws.
The white strip going across diagonally is the pivot and the black things either side are the motors. At the end of each motor is a white plastic stem. You can see a closer pic of one of these below.
The stem has small teeth and the motor has a cog on the end of it, so when the motor turns over it pushes this stem out or pulls it in depending on which direction it is turning.
The stem itself is connected to the outer plastic ring around the motors so it pushes and pulls the ring in and out.
Because the white plastic pivot bar runs diagonally between these two motors and stems it means the push pull action of the upper motor pivots the ring left and right.
The bottom motor pushes and pulls to pivot the ring up and down. Both motors can operate to get all the various positions in between. Easy as that.
There are 3 wires coming out of the 2 motors. The blue wire is common to both motors and the yellow belongs to the top (left/right motor) while the orange belongs to the bottom (up/down) motor.
When a power supply goes onto the yellow wire and the blue wire is earthed the top motor cranks outwards.
When polarity is reversed (power to the blue wire and earthed yellow wire) the motor cranks back in again. The same thing applies to the orange wire for the bottom motor.
So when you push your power mirror buttons that is in effect what you are doing and what is going on in side that side mirror.
Now you may also have noticed in an earlier picture when I popped the mirror out that there were some wires hanging out of the glass. These are a bit of a bonus.....they belong to the heaters inside the mirrors......heh, heh, I'm like a pig in shit now......not only will the mirrors be electric they will be heated too. This is an absolutely critical piece of technology as I will need these when I get the car on the road and go on the snow run at Ruapehu. These little heaters will thaw the mirrors so I have good visibility even at below zero degree conditions.
Okay so how do the heaters work?
First you have to get the glass out. No mean feat as it is bloody near superglued in place. Breaking it away bit by bit required a bit of care and I decided to wear me safetys! Not just because I look so damn good in them, but also because bits fly everywhere.
If there is one thing I learned when I built my last rod.......it is......."if you think something could go wrong here and I shouldn't really be doing this".......then don't as sure as hell, it will go wrong. Just ask me about the angle grinder and my jandal's one day.
Anyway once the glass is peeled away, this is what you see. A small thin sheet of plastic that incorporates the heater element.
Flip that over and peel away the other side of the sticky stuff and you can see the heater element.
Each wire goes to a metal filament that winds its way across the plastic sheet (bit like a kids...."Help Bugs Bunny find his way to the carrots"......puzzle). Neither of these filaments actually touch at any point but the black material between does conduct power between the two circuits but with some resistance. It is this resistance that generates heat. Voila heated mirrors.
Now the interesting point is that because the the silver circuits don't actually meet anywhere I can effectively cut them off and the heater will still work. I just need to be sure to cut the pad to length by cutting vertically rather than cutting horizontally across the heater pad.
So its not a perfect fit but it will heat the centre of the mirror and the heat will transmit through the glass over time as well. You can see in the second pic roughly how the pad will sit. This pad will be for the drivers side though so the black side will face toward us and the silver circuits and wires will go in behind.
In the pic below you can see how the mirrors come from the manufacturer. So how do we make all that electric stuff fit inside the small mirror body. First I'll pull out the manual pivoting face that comes with the mirrors. Normally you'd mount the glass on the pivoting face once the body has been painted to match the car, so they come with the mirrors not yet glued in.
Now that this is out we can see how much......actually how little space we have to work with.
Ooops kinda like a round peg in a square hole! No panic though, I carefully selected these motors with a view to cutting them down.....here's one I prepared earlier!
And now, screwed into place.
You will remember then that the original mirror had a plastic backing that clipped onto the motor. Then that had the heater pad stuck to it.....then the mirrors was stuck to that.
Fairly easy except I will glue mine in rather than clip them, I will use silicone so if ever a glass should break I should be able to ease it away with a bit of effort.
BUT!!!!!! One last improvement. You see these mirrors are so small you can't see much out of them, so I am going to put convex lenses in to give a better view.
The problem with that though is how do you stick a curved mirror on a flat mounting? Well as luck would have it the mounting pad that came with the mirrors is curved on its back face and wouldn't you know it, it fits perfectly (well with a bit of filing it does) to the shape of the new mirror lenses.
All I need to do now is get a glass expert to cut the glass to shape.
This is about as far as I can go for now with these as I can't assemble the mirrors until we can fit them to the body and can paint them to match the car. Then all the components get screwed and glued into place before wiring up to switches to operate them....but that is another story for another day!
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