How do you remove and disassemble the side mirror of a Subaru Forester?

Answer 1

As with most modern car parts, the side mirrors of my 1998 Forester appear to be designed to be disposible and can only be dissambled with persistance and a bit of luck that some of the components don't break in the process. Some moron kicked my side mirror off one night and this is what I learnt in repairing it - hope it speeds up your repairs.

To remove the whole wing mirror assembly from the car is covered in a few other forums that I found via a quick Google search. In brief you need to prise off the bit of triangular plastic on the inside of the car covering the mirror insertion (held by 3 plastic press stud things) as well as whole door liner to get access to the 3 screws holding the mirror assembly onto the car. The door liner is held on by screws and plastic press studs. N.B. 2 screws were hidden behind the covers for the speakers (which are easily prised off with a screw driver) - 1 screw behind the large speaker cover and 1 behind the smaller speaker cover next to the door handle. Once the door liner is removed you can easily unscrew the mirror assembly and disconnect the electrics harness for the mirror motor.

Once the mirror assembly is off the car to dismantle it there are the 3 screws in the base of the swing mechanism which you can now get to. The main body of the mirror assembly is accessed by prising off the mirror glass itself, only the glass, not the surrounding plastic mount the the glass is glued to. In my 1998 Forester the glass was held in by 2 pieces of double sided tape near the centre of the mirror. Slow persistent pressure with a broad screw driver worked for me but I was lucky not to shatter the glass. If you do shatter the mirror you can probably get a new piece cut from a glass supplier. Once the glass is off you can get access to all the screws holding everything together. Depending on your repair you may not need to remove the assembly from the side of the car but if you are glueing anything together it will probably be easier to take it off the car.

A quick tip for these types of jobs is to take photos with a digital camera at any critical point of the job so you can easily refer back to it what it is meant to look like when putting everything back together (eg sequence of wires in the wiring harness). It may prevent all those left over parts at the end of the job that you have no idea where they came from.