Reattached rear view mirror on the Yaris

A couple of weeks back I had the windshield replaced on my Toyota Yaris. A little stone had struck the old windshield, and the large crack was too big to fix. Well this morning (after the car had been parked since Friday at our hotel in Dunedin), I noticed that something in the car was not right. This (see image below) is not where the rear view mirror is supposed to be -- note that it's resting down in front of the gearshift, where it really offers little useful purpose.
So once we were home, I popped over to Autozone and paid $5 for a kit of rearview mirror adhesive:
I should mention that I did very briefly consider calling the company that had replaced the windshield, and have them fix this. But that would have involved more than $5 worth of inconvenience. OK, back to the task at hand. That big black dot near the top of the windshield (above my Florida Sunpass sticker) is where a small (maybe 1 inch at longest edge) piece of flat metal should be glued. The metal piece is grooved around the edges, and the mirror assembly slides over it. I scraped the residue of the old glue from the windshield and from the metal piece (should have taken a pic, but wanted to get this done!), and then opened the blue packet from the kit. I have no idea what chemical cleaner that thing held, but one wipe on the windshield removed any remaining trace of glue.
I followed the instructions from the kit and waited 2 minutes after the cleaning before continuing. Then came the (mildly) stressful part. The glue from the kit is super strong. One drop is all that is applied to the metal piece, then that is immediately pressed to its former location on the windshield. Although I pressed/held it in place for a minute as instructed, I could tell that it was already stuck there and was not going to move. After another 15 minutes of letting everything set up (again, as per instructions), I slipped the mirror back on over the grooved metal tab, and (for now anyway!) all again looks proper. Hopefully it will stay this time! If not, I'll call the folks who'd replaced the windshield :)
Reader Comments