FJ62-style Door Mirror with Signal Lamp Conversion Mod: Part 1
To preface this brief technical bit, my first Toyota Pickup was an 83 4wd pickup that I modded pretty heavily in my own way. One of my favorite mods was the power mirrors off an FJ62; the mirrors were tall and wide with great visibility, and they gave the truck a more square-shouldered look. Since buying
Ventre I've wanted to do a similar mod. I also like having redundancy when it comes to signals and markers, so I figured, why not do both?
Step one was sourcing some repro 62 mirrors.
These were $100 from Cool Cruisers of Texas.
My initial plan had been to remove the nuts from the bottoms of these, remove the nuts from the bottoms of my factory mirrors and Ta-dah! Mirror conversion! Unfortunately, that turned out to not be possible. These mirrors don't articulate in an orbital fashion like most mirrors, they move linearally from side-to-side, with the mirror panes themselves orbiting on a ball joint. There are no nuts or threads on these 62 mirrors, just a shaft, a spring, and a star clamp. Some mild kerjiggering is required.
Step 1: Cut the press-on star clamp off the main shaft and release the spring.
Step 2 unpack the spring, remove the riser and remove the three tech screws holding the baseplate and shaft onto the housing.
Step three, drive the shaft out of the baseplate with Linemans Pliers. Totally Disassembled:
The plan for reassembly is to replace the shaft with an anchor bolt and apply tension to the spring as installed with a nylock nut and washer. It's inexpensive and allows me to dial in the tension as needed. That happens later.
My next step was to gently detach the mirror pane from the ball mount in the housing:
For the signals, I sourced some small marker LEDs from SuperBrightLEDS at $5.00 each.
Drill a Hole:
Test Fit:
Plan your wire routing:
This is as far as I can go for this evening. This weekend, my plan is to fog these mirror housings semi-gloss black and finish the wiring. If everything works out, I should have these installed next week sometime.
More soon.