Hey folks, hope someone can give me a hand.

My gf's passenger side mirror is busted. The housing is physically fine however the power mirror function is shot (driver's side is fine). I'm thinking of buying another passenger side mirror unit, taking it apart and just replacing hers with the working unit so that she doesn't have to paint the actual housing since the donor unit is a different colour.

I assume that there's a plug in harness behind the actual mirror (ie I don't have to take apart the interior door panel to get at it.

How difficult would this task be? Anyone have any detailed instructions as to how I can go about doing this? Pics would be even better!

 

what car? you have to remove the door panel to get to the plug on the dc5

 

Ooops.. forgot that this is a shared forum.

It's for a 02 RSX.

Well in one of her dealer servicing for oil changes, she mentioned it and the mechanic manually aimed the window but then disconnected it so that now, the power mechanism doesn't even move. Do you think he went through the whole hassle of removing the door panel to unplug it? Dealer didn't charge anything for aiming and disconnecting if that helps.

 

unless you have some real thin tongs or something to get down there, you need to remove the door panel. i suppose it's possible to do without, but would involve some craftiness and the right tools. easier jus to pull the panel off, it takes like 10 minutes to do that.

 

My goal though, is to splice into the existing wiring/harness going into the door already. I just want to replace the actual mechanicsm behind the mirror as I think that may be busted after the dealer tried to fix it.

I've seen some pictures of broken mirrors before and it looks like there's a small black housing that is fully enclosed and then the mirror just attaches to it via double sided tape. I'm thinking of buying another mirror (used, different colour), taking it apart and transfering the mechanism into my gf's car. I guess I can either run the wire through the door, but I hear that the rubber gasket might be dry and/or hard so I may just splice into it instead.

 

The motor of the mirror has a harness inside the door panel. You're going to have to take the mirror off and disassemble it, which requires you to take the door panel off.

Running wires through the door grommet is easy. First use a coat hanger, electrical tape the wires to the back of the coat hanger, then lube the wires/electrical tape up good with some cheap smelly moisturizer (I'm not kidding) If you don't use lubricant, you will burn up the jackets on the wire, and down to the copper where it will short out. Trust me, takes all of 5 minutes to run wires through the grommet once you have it down.

Don't splice, you don't need to splice for any reason, if your're just replacing the stock mirrors with stock mirrors, there are harnesses everywhere for that purpose.

You can pull the glass off and get to the motor behind it, but you then can't get to the wires because they go through the door. Trust me, the door is very easy to take off and it will make everything much much easier.

If you're good with a multimeter, you can test each pin going to the mirror for power when you use the power mirrors...

I just installed these mirrors, and had to go through the pinouts... 3 wires for motor, 2 for blinker, 2 for defrost.