the Walnut Diary

I drove the 2014 es300h into the auto shop to add washer fluid prior to a drive to the city. My last project in there had been the unpacking and assembly of a large backup battery system, and the big problem had been lifting the 116 lb. battery out of the box, which had to be preserved in case of a warranty claim. I settled upon the car hoist for the dead lift. Two inch straps looped through the arms of the hoist made an impossible lift quite simple.

But then I neglected to lower the hoist. The rear arms remained in place, trailer-wide, and poised to nab the right mirror on the Lexus if its driver suffers from tunnel vision.

Kingston Lexus had the cover kit ready Monday morning, so I picked it up and set to work on the disassembly. What seemed like a simple job became a lot more complicated when I became aware of the number and variety of screws holding the break-away mirror in position. The mirror itself is quite sturdy, and can tolerate a fair amount of abuse, except for the overuse of lubricants, but I’ll get to that later. The part below the shell — I’ll call it the post for want of a better term — sustained a bit of damage in the low speed crunch. Because I didn’t really understand how a break-away mirror mechanism operates, I wasn’t certain that the repair would actually work until the end. The immediate problem was a spider web of little wires. There are two to the mirror to heat it. There is a pair in a coupler to perform more important functions, and the coupler was locked in the normal Toyota manner — easy for the members of the group to open but bewildering for anyone else. This much complexity I could handle. But then the bottom piece with whole bunch more wires fell off. One was a light with two wires, which mysteriously came on when I held it just so, but otherwise remained dormant. It is housed in a mouse-sized white enclosure which seems designed by some demon gamer. It defeated me for some time last evening, but this morning I realized that if it won’t go onto the bottom section with the classy signal light part, it must by exclusion fit into the upper-central part which holds the mirror.

If anyone had discovered that illuminating insight in my reading, I would have saved a lot of time and aggravation last night. For the record, the white mouse mounts up, and the classy signal light goes into the lower part of the thing. After many sessions with the couplers for these accessories as I worked them through the various cut-outs on the central part, I was rather pleased to discover that the tiny wires remained intact. This wiring did not come not from a box store.

Where I turned the corner on the job was when I gave up on screws and put a couple of bolts through to hold the middle parts together. This rigidity gave me a basis for more rewiring and eventual victory. Once I got the bottom part on, I carefully removed the supporting bolts and replaced them with screws from the collection. One missing screw was replaced with a 3/4″ x #8 Robertson wood screw. It worked fine to reach through two layers and bore securely into the highly visible eggshell cover.

The shell was now intact. I had wisely rerouted the mirror wires through a port near to the post. They connected readily. Then I remembered what somebody online or in a video said about putting vaseline on the mirror clips to help the installation. I delegated this task to my wife. For the record, too much vaseline on those four clips is a good deal worse than too little. On the brink of success, we couldn’t get the mirror to stay in place. I even sprayed the clips with brake cleaner. Don’t do this. Carbon tetrachloride seems to erode black plastic, making it look as though it had survived a particularly salty ride.
Fortunately the rest of the car was encrusted with salt at the time and the mirror frame didn’t look out of place.

This project was a test to determine whether our next car will be another Lexus, or a different brand and model. The dealership was helpful. The materials for the repair cost $168 CDN with taxes included. The battered post still does its job. The complexity of the assembly was a little worse for the bumbling amateur than the projects demanded by my previous shop toy, a 2004 Porsche Cayenne, though the Lexus has required virtually no repairs in six years, while the Cayenne kept me busy.

So Lexus has come out of this looking pretty good. It will definitely be a hybrid, as well.