Tech- Mirror glass replacement

I broke the passenger side rearview mirror on my trusty big white pickup a while ago. I somehow backed it into a branch of a neighbor's tree that's near my driveway. A rarity; I pride myself in my backing abilities, but I was attempting an extremely difficult backing-up trailer-turning maneuver and ran out of space.

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I bought this replacement-glass-kit-thing at the local Advance Auto parts store. It is actually a plastic, not glass, mirror that's probably about 1/16" thick. It's somewhat flexible, and the idea is that you can cut it to fit your mirror. Don't know how well it will work, but at only $7, we'll give it a try.

The first thing to do is to get all of the remaining pieces of broken mirror glass off of the mirror back. To do this, I had considered repeatedly backing the truck into the same tree branch, since it did such a good job at removing most of the mirror glass in the first place. Hmm, that might be too tricky, even for me. I settled on using a 1" putty knife and a razor-holder tool to pick the pieces off manually. The razor tool was to slice through the adhesive holding the mirror parts stubbornly to the backing plate.

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WARNING: when you do this, you will inevitably cause many small sharp pieces of mirror glass to litter the ground. This could cause someone to get a nasty cut at sometime in the future. So I drove to the parking lot of the place that fired me and did it there.

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I somehow did not cut myself doing this. So even if the replacement mirror doesn't work, that was a major achievement.

Next, hold the mirror panel up to the mirror back plate, and draw around the outline with a marker. Make sure you are doing the correct side! One side is pretty blurry; this is the back side. The other side is covered by a thin plastic protective sheet, lift up a corner and you'll see the nice clear reflection; this is the front side.

This is the blurry side.

Cut out the mirror. I am using a set of big tin snips. I love this tool, it cut the plastic easily. You may have to do some sandy-sanding around the edges to get a nice fit. Take some time here or everyone that ever sits in the passenger side will comment on what a poor job you did. You know how they are.

The kit comes with some double-sided tape (my brother D once pointed out that ALL tape is double-sided, only some are sticky on both sides). Peel and stick the tape onto the back of the mirror, put it in place, and you're doney-done. As a bonus, on my truck, the mirror backing plate itself is curved, so the plastic mirror panel can adapt to this and now has the good convex shape like the original glass panel had.

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This would be an easy fix on most cars, even older cars for which replacement mirrors or glass is not available.