Attaching Outside Rearview Mirrors onto Car Bodies

Hey gang. Dennis told me that it was worth putting together a small tutorial for this after I showed it in slider's Roadrunner thread.

Have you ever gotten to the point when you're ready to attach those rearview mirrors or things like headlights on say an old 37 Chevy or the like and you find yourself dreading the whole experience because of glue marks, marred paint from "missing the mark" when gluing or some other disaster like dropping the mirror with a drop of super glue on the attaching point onto like an obvious place on your mirror like paint job?? I have and it SUCKS! A couple of years ago when I rebuilt my Challenger I was bound and determined to attach some mirrors to the doors. But how.................? An idea came to mind.................I decided to pin them to the door.

I'll walk you through my procedure here:

Pick out the spot on the body where the mirrors are going to mount up and mark them with the very tip of an X-acto blade and then using the tip of the X-acto blade twist the whole knife a couple of turns like as if using it like a drill just to get a good pilot mark on it. After that I pick out a straight pin and measure it with a Vernier caliper to determine the thickness of it and select the appropriate drill bit from your pin vise bit selection and drill a hole through the body. Insert the straight pin through the back side.

To illustrate, you'll end up with it looking like this:

and you'll just cut a lot of the excess of the needle off so you've got this goin' on: (be sure to put a drop of super glue on the back side of the body where the pin head is so you'll secure the pin in place)

Then you drill the same hole into the mirror assy with the pin vise so you've got this goin' on. (you can see the hole in the mirror assy on the right)

After you've dry fitted the mirror onto the needle to determine that you've got the proper depth drilled and the mirror mounting base will fit snugly against the body, you apply a small dab of super glue onto the end of the pin sticking out from the body and mount your mirror onto it like so:

If the mirror ever does fall off you can just simply remount it back onto the pin again. And that's it! Easy as pie!