Floppy sun visor, broken mirror - repair/replacement

[tvjake2]

I know this is a burning issue in the community so here is the solution.

So I use my sun visor to hold the sun shade in place and one day I flipped the visor up to put away the shade and the visor would not stay up. It just flopped down with no tension to hold it up. There did not seem to be any way to tighten it up so I went to Google punched in my search and discovered a replacement E31 visor for $225 and a used one on eBay for $65 but it had a shattered mirror. So....being the tightwad 8 Series goof that I am I decided to fix it myself. After a bit more searching and finding no other used visors I bought the one off eBay. It came in good shape, actually a bit better than my old one...with the exception of the mirror. My idea was to undo the threads and put the old cover and mirror on the eBay frame and sew it back up. Easy, huh. Wrong. It appeared to be impossible to pull the metal struts out of the formed, very stiff, foam piece on the interior of the old visor. While looking at the workings of the visor we noticed that the mirror appeared to be removable from the interior frame.

eBay visor with (really) shattered mirror.


After stripping the visor edge threading I had access to the interior of the visor. The old mirror slid out fairly easily and is shown with the mirror pushed part way out below. Note electrical connections for vanity light. The blue switch is activated by the sliding door. There is a contact strip shown on the right side metal mounting bar that completes the circuit for the light. This whole plastic section fits in the foam form pretty neatly. The mirror (below) is partly moved to the left for removal. The lighter colored plastic is the mirror door that slides to the right into the frame.



The mirror came out fairly easily. It was harder to get the broken mirror out of the eBay visor as it seemed to have more glue in the plastic guides that hold the mirror. The eBay visor interior plastic was also black whereas the one for my car is tan and grey. I had to clean the old glue out of the eBay visor completely so the good mirror would slide in. If you look closely at the mirror mounting section you'll see two two small hold tabs in the left side of the frame that hold the mirror in place. This was a bit tricky and at first the whole piece would not sit well until the mirror was properly secured. After that it all fit back together perfectly. If you just have a broken mirror it may be possible to buy a replacement and slide it in and sew it up. A few drops of rubber glue is a good idea for the mirror.
WrenchFest #2 9.jpg

The good mirror is now in the replacement visor (right side) and ready to be stitched up.



I had a tricky time finding thread that would match closely in color and size to the BMW thread. It was suggested by my WrenchFest cohorts that I should use blue and red thread but I just stuck to the standard grey stuff. I finally found some crochet thread and a small carpet needle that did the trick. Stitching was not hard but was somewhat fiddly. There are stitches on the edge of each side of the leather covers and the cross stitch goes under those stitches to hold the clamshell leather cover together. You can see the cross stitch in the finished version below. It all mounted up fine and the connection to operate the vanity light works great.


Note: I did a mini-post mortem on the broken visor by removing foam to see what was inside. There is no way to fix the visor if it goes "floppy", you will need to buy a new one. Also the visor strut that mounts to the ceiling cannot be removed without destroying all the foam around it.

[8eights]

Nice job, Thanks for posting!

[Dr. T]

This just happened to mine today...drivers side visor won’t stay up.

Tvjake, you didn’t say what mechanism makes it stay up? Is there a spring or lever inside that breaks? Is the mechanism not replaceable?

So, does anyone have a drivers side black one available for sale?

[tvjake2]

It wasn't obvious what holds it up so I guess it the tension on the bar by the foam? I didn't see anything inside that would indicate how it's held up.