2000 Jag X-Type 3.0

Previous efforts to repair a cracked door mirror only make things worse

1994 ROVER 216 SLi

I am a klutz. And, if old wives’ tales are to be believed, about to experience seven years of bad luck. One of the most recent jobs I’ve tackled on my Rover was replacing the glass in the driver’s door mirror. It involved me painstakingly scraping the traces of the old, cracked one off and then sticking a new one in place. I was almost proud of myself.

It didn’t last long, though. I hadn’t properly mounted the mirror pad back on to the electric motor in the middle of the housing. So when I took the dogs for a walk and drove the Rover down a bumpy farm track – much to the chagrin of a local walker who probably thought I was going to abandon it in a field and set fire to it – it fell out and was left dangling by the motor/heating wires.

Back home, I had another go at it – and cracked the new glass. Well done me! The obvious solution was to order a new mirror insert and just stick it over the top, but, it turned out that my over-zealous extraction of the old glass had also damaged the heater element.

New glass was £7.99 and I found an entire new mirror assembly online for £29.99

– with working heater pad intact. Installing it involved removing a small piece of interior trim, unclipping the wiring, undoing three screws, removing the old door mirror and putting the new one on. It took a fraction of the time it had taken me to do the glass insert in the first place – and it gets warm when you put the rear window demister on. Not that I should need that function for a while yet…