Passenger Door Mirror Assembly

[byebyemirror]

So the other day I was worried about a big midterm that i had later in the day and in my rush to get to studying i backed into a support beam in my parking garage and completely knocked the mirror off my passenger side door (crazily, the mirror itself is fine but what holds it on to the car is totally broken.

As a broke, though resourceful college student I don't really want to have to pay a mechanic to fix it for me. And I found the part that I would use to replace the broken one online, but have no idea how to do it.

Is it hard to remove the passenger side mirror assembly? and once that's done is it easy to put the new one on?

Thanks for the help.

[byebyemirror]

Oh, its a 1998 4.6 HSE

[Mr Tj]

I can't speak to how easy / tricky it is to work with the mirror assembly, but I can say that there could be a hidden gotcha.

Some years back I knocked mirrors with a parked car and ended up replacing the glass (and the adapter on the glass back). Somehow, as a side result of that, the assembly motor now does the weird "don't lower when backing, only when coming out of reverse into drive" trick. Diagnostics at the dealer showed that the signals reach the mirror assembly, but that something after that goes wrong.

Then again, that's with Lucas, and I forget the exact year of the Bosch change-over now...

Since the dealer price for the switch-out is $500+ (at least in IA), I'd say it's definitively worth giving it a go yourself.