opening the interior rear view mirror?

Anybody opened up the mirror? To separate the glass from the shell... to get at the guts inside the rear view mirror?

This is for pre-Sept.2014 car... no autopilot

Tips welcome...

We can do better than that thread...

Here are some pictures of R&R for interior mirror.


Step 1. Separate the right half of the housing. Using a flat head screw driver, thrust into the seam crack from the right so the blade goes in behind the left half of the housing:




There are several mated clips around these halves, found in these locations. Insert the blade near these and twist, they pop apart.




Then the left half of the housing basically just falls off easily. Here's what it looks like with no housing.




The next part takes nerve.
Grab the mirror stalk and rotate it counter clockwise, about 45 degrees.
While keeping the mounting face flush and flat to the windshield. Just twist, no pull.
It's a spring loaded hexagon shaped clamp.
This frees the mirror from the windshield.
Here's what the hexagon stump mount looks like on the windshield, the thing on the left is the rain sensor:




Unplug the mirror wire harness. There's a little tab you press in to separate the plug from the socket.
Picture above is already unplugged.
OMG the mirror is a Volvo part!

\



OK, the reason why I wanted to remove the mirror is so that I could rotate it around 180 degrees, turning it upside-down so the straight edge of the mirror is along the bottom, and the bumped side is now facing up. The next steps show how.

I wanted to rotate the mirror for a couple reasons.

1. The shape of the mirror follows the shape of the rear window image when the mirror has the flat side down. Ever since I got the car it seemed like the mirror was upsidedown for this reason.

2. I wanted to raise the height of the mirror on the windshield. I am tall, 6'4" my head is near the ceiling, and the mirror is just too low blocking a lot of my view.

Notice that the stem ball joint is not dead center on the back of the mirror, in stock placement, the ball is on the top of the mirror. By rotating the mirror around the ball, the bulk of the mirror now pivots and rests above the ball joint.

There is a key in the mirror ball joint that prevents from just rotating the mirror the way I wanted.

First to deal with is the compression ring around the ball joint. Seen here as a steel ring.




There's a gap in the ring, insert your flat blade screwdriver in there and twist to open it up, and pop the ring up off its resting spot.

When the ring is off you can pull the ball out of its socket.
And now you can see the key grove in the ball that prevents total degrees of freedom.




Here's a closeup down the ball socket, you can see the plastic "key" on the lower left jutting out that fits into the grove in the ball.
Dremel took the key off in a second, it's just plastic:




With that key removed, put the mirror back together, ball in socket, then snap ring.

Here is a picture now from the side with mirror rotated upsidedown:


Now, just install the mirror in reverse order, rotate it back onto the stump, plug wires back together, and snap the closure halves together over it.

Here's what I mean the shape fits the rear window better with the upsidedown mirror, even the sides of the mirror follow the sides of the window slope better:


And now the mirror is higher up on the windshield.

I can see a little more out the window underneath it.

Having raised the mirror, the rear window view is slightly modified too.

Now the center rear seat headrest is not obstructing the image out the rear window in any way.
There is slightly less vertical opening view out the back window, the rear window is "squashed" in the vertical dimension a bit.


But I never look back!!

Welcome!

Now who can tell and show how to separate the mirror glass from the shell to get inside it?

I want to do some stuff inside the mirror.

Barry said:

Now all we need is a rear center headrest removal tool to really improve rear view mirror visibility :smile:

Click to expand...

From my vantage point (6'4" tall sitting in driver's seat) the rear center headrest does not intrude into the visual space of the rear window reflected by the mirror.

No tool required.