[wooka]

Team,

Fed up with the vibrations and the off-angle for the IRVM when one toggles between day and night modes (which somehow every other OEM has mastered, right from my humble Santro Xing of yesteryear), I decided to overhaul the OE mirror and go with a Maruti automatic day/night IRVM.




The culprit - a shaky OE mount system with no way for one to tighten the socket. Other brands may either have a self-fastening solution or one with a screw.


Project costs - 4k mirror + 100 mirror cover + 350 wiring harness + some coffee (optional)

The results are pretty OK for a cold-hands attempt (NOIDA- it just rained today, and it's a cold and windy Winter) with eye-balled measurements to trim the upper mirror cap (hides the harness.)

1. Day 1 - Placed a sourced mirror mount with urethane on the windshield. Covered the gap with some extra to give a smooth OE look. Sadly, I had to undo all the excess adhesive later since the mirror didn't fit neatly. However, better planning and 5 minutes of effort later this could have looked better! There was a choice of taking off the OE mount but the risk outweighed the benefits. I decided to place the new mount next to the OE mount at the advice of the windshield professional. Some masking tape kept it against the glass. I read that curing time can go up to a week during the cold. I do not dispute it at all.




2. Day 2 - Worked on the wiring! Made the mistake of forgetting to RTFM. The green wire from the harness goes to the +ve 12V (ACC is a good fuse to tap) and the red is for reverse +12V (pointless when you have a reverse camera on the stereo). Who'd have thought?



Black is ground, thankfully. After hours of multimeter testing I went back to reading Shashi's thread HERE (DIY: Auto-Dimming IRVM install in a Maruti Suzuki XL6). He's been a TBHP-gem-of-a-person through my K12 2010 Swift ZXI ownership and a trove of knowledge (and spare part guide!)

3. Day 3 - It's been raining so I waited a couple of days before I got started on loading the windshield mount. The urethane is still somewhat gel-like so I am not going to put the car through the paces anytime soon. The focus today was to get the mirror connected and done with. And it worked out just fine.

Side notes:
1. I had a broken piece of plastic lying in the plastic trim above the sunshades. Near the mic-box! I removed it gladly. If anyone can make sense of it, please do. It's been bugging me for years.


2. I took the opportunity to upgrade my trim clips to foam-lined ones. This greatly has reduced my rattles system-wide when used on other panels.


3. I found a better location for the Jio Motive dongle (gives my AI box wifi when I am driving, and my wife cribs less about Airtel, I theorize). Wrapped it up in foam, zip-tied the foam and stuffed it behind the trim on the drivers side by the dashboard. Hopefully, the GPS signal will be better and I will have to worry less about the theft of said dongle (defeating its purpose altogether?)

[Aditya]

DIY: Fitting an auto-dimming IRVM in a Mahindra Thar - Post copied to a new thread.