Slide mount rear-view mirror - success !!

[GEEMCB]

Greetings, all

Thought I should revive a dead thread (if that's the term !).

I enquired a while back about mounting an alternative rear view mirror to
avoid looking at the front of my style bar rather than the cars / trucks
behind ...

Well - it's in. With thanks to Geoff who posted a link to a page on the UK
MX5 owners club site, I tracked down & imported a rod mount mirror from
Vintage Car Parts ... link here (product #294 BTW).
http://www.vintagecarparts.co.uk/ Great people to deal with - fast,
prompt delivery, rapid response to email queries etc.

Then trawled through the marine outlets & found a second hand chrome plated
canopy deck fitting at Fosters in Auckland. Scrounged a length of 5mm
stainless rod from a marine fabricator, polished it up, drilled a hole in
the end, ran a 1/8" bolt through & connected the rod & the deck fitting,
took the original mirror out, drilled a 5mm hole in the plastic trim at the
leading edge of the header panel, slid the mirror onto the rod, inserted the
end of the rod into the hole in the plastic, stuck some sawn off screw heads
over the holes in the fitting & stuck the base of the marine fitting onto
the small square section at the base of the screen where the dash bolt
hides.

At the moment the base is only held in position with some blue tack until
I'm confident that the position is OK - longer term I'll use some
double-sided tape for a permanent fix.

If any of you are interested in doing likewise, note that there was quite a
bit of fiddling to get it right! Due to the rake of the MX5 screen, the
mirror is close to it's maximum rotation on the ball socket & MkI had the
base of the rod mounted in the middle of the dash. With subsequent fiddling
I found that I could move the base to the front edge of the dash & still get
the correct angle. Required a second piece of rod though, didn't it !
Hence MkII.

Note that MkI also vibrated like crazy & had quite a bit of sloporosity
allowing the rod (& mirror) to rotate. Mark II is much better - but may
require a small piece of double sided tape between the back of the mirror
clamp & the inside of the screen. Time will tell.

On the safety side of things, I contacted the regs people at LTSA. There is
no reg that applies directly - however the mobile phone mounting rules get
close. Basically as long as the mirror functions as the original did & is
not mounted to the rear of the steering wheel, all is well.

Cost was about $55 all up - mirror, deck fitting, rod, 1/8" nuts & bolts
etc.

And does it look OK ? Damn right. As zorruno observed (when suggesting that
one solution was to remove the style bar ...) - very retro cool.

Regards,
Greg
1990 V Special

PS - & yes, the mounting point for the mirror will make a good place for a
decent interior light - next project ! (Simon - point noted about the 96
light not being that bright ...).

PPS - I am also unsure about how a dash-mounted mirror would function. I
need to have the mirror at least a third of the way up the rod to be able to
see anything of the road behind (& no, I'm not of above or below average
height) - so not sure how that would work.

[Simon Lord]

Sounds great - I'm sure we'd all like to see some pics.

One of the great things about this list is the things you can learn. For me,
a particular highlight is the word 'sloporosity', which I will endeavoiur
to get into print as soon as possible as I feel this should be more widely
used.

On a serious note, it might be worth getting the LTSA ruling in writing - or
at least having a note of the time and date of the conversation as well as
the name of the person you spoke to. Save time and trouble at the next WOF.

Simon

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From: ~Jeff~ <jifjif@gmail.com>
To: MX5List <mx5list@mx5club.org.nz>
Subject: Re: Air intake pipe on TradeMe +10HP... I don't think so!
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hmmm ... actually it'd be good for the non-intercooled Greddy
turbokit. It'd stop the plastic crossover pipe blowing up like a
balloon!

And you could fry eggs on it afterwards

On Tue, 1 Mar 2005 21:07:44 +1300, Matt & Sarah Avery
<avery296@slingshot.co.nz> wrote:
[...]