Skip navigation

How to remove wing mirror glass

Post

Back to the top

I found a solution

Morning all,

this maybe useful to some of you, as I know that mirror glass to fit the internally adjustable mirrors is hard to come by. Having broken one trying to remove it, I was convinced there was a better way.

Had a go with another spare wing mirror last night with success. What you need is a heat gun or hairdryer, a filling or putty knife, and some thin wire.
Firstly I heated the glass with a heat gun, low setting, so the glass was just to hot to touch. I then used a thin flexible metal filling knife or putty knife like the below to just get under one edge.

71A4P7UXmwL._AC_SL1500_.jpg

Do this very carefully. If you don't have a suitable knife, and old hacksaw blade snapped in half might work. All you are trying to do is seperate the first 5mm or so. With the heat, you should find that the backing plastic is flexible so that will bend instead of the glass.

once you've got that far, you need about 20cm of thin wire - I used some .5mm stainless - and two things to wrap it round - as if you making a cheese slice. With the aid of the knife, get the wire under the mirror edge that you have just lifted - it will keep sticking back down.

When you've got the wire under running from top to bottom (when viewing the mirror as you would on the car), apply some more heat and then pull the wire under the mirror. You need to pull along the mirror, not up against it. Keep repeating this until you get to the end - mirror will come off in one piece. If it gets hard to pull, apply a bit more heat. Slow and steady.

I used WD 40 and panel wipe to remove the left over sticky stuff on the back of the glass. Do NOT use cellulose thinners - it takes the mirror backing off as well as the sticky! It took me longer to get the residue off than it took me to get the mirror off!

Hope that proves useful to someone.

J
 

My rebuild thread I will try and keep up to date: here

K-Jet fuel pressure test guage How-To
0 guests and 0 members have just viewed this: None.