My mirror saga... finally happy!

Fklein6768 said:

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Autocrap messing w the phone....

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jamnmon66 said:

So, I have completely fallen in love with driving with no doors & top off but it's been frustrating, to say the least, to find a mirror solution that I'm happy with. I ruled out putting a mirror in the hinge because it can't be used with soft doors. I also ruled out relocating the factory mirrors because I wanted to leave them on the hard doors. From there, I started with the Lange Originals Quick Mirror II. As with so many things these days, the design is good but it's made out of cheap materials which ruins the product. It installed easily and looked OK but the bar that holds the mirror is hollow and made out of thin material. I'm assuming this saves cost and weight but it has the effect of the mirror vibrating to the point of being unusable. It also crushes and scratches easily with the set screws. If you're not happy with the first adjustment, you'd better hope you don't need to move it up or down in the quick release bracket or you'll be able to see the marks you made on the bar the first time you tightened them down. In addition, while driving, the bar moving through the wind made an annoying whistling noise. And, finally, the handle broke off of the quick release connection and the plate that it screws into eventually stripped out. I'm glad I only bought one of them to start out with because it was money wasted.

So, the lessons learned were that I wanted a mirror that didn't vibrate on the road and was heavy-duty enough to deal with my (apparent) abuse. After quite a bit of internet searching, I found these extension arms. They are for a YJ/TJ but I thought I could make them work with a JK relocation bracket. The issue with the extension arms was that they required the use of factory Jeep YJ/TJ mirrors because, apparently, aftermarket mirrors are pressed into the arm rather than threaded like the factory ones. I checked with the dealer and a set of factory YJ mirrors were over $200 and I couldn't find any at the local Jeep junkyard. Also, I couldn't find a much better price on new ones online and the used ones that I found on ebay looked pretty rough.

At this point, I started thinking about how much money I had spent on this project and I was also thinking that I was likely to damage whatever mirrors I put on the brackets by bouncing them off of a tree or a rock so I started thinking that it would be nice if the mirrors themselves were cheap/disposable. This sent me on a bit of a bunny trail as you'll see. I had the bright idea of trying to put motorcycle mirrors on the extension arms. I figured out that standard motorcycle mirrors were 10mm and the factory YJ/TJ mirrors were also 10mm so I thought it would work. I settled on these and ordered everything. The problem was, when everything arrived, the thread pitch on the mirror was different than the extension arm so I either had to ditch the idea of motorcycle mirrors, find an adapter or drill out the threads on the arms and put in a sleeve with the correct pitch. After a ton of research, I found these adapters on ebay that wound up working perfectly. Be aware that if you go this route that the adapters ship from Taiwan and it takes a couple of weeks for them to arrive. Once they finally arrived, the problem was that the mirrors looked much smaller on the Jeep than they did in my hand. Because your eyes are so much further away from the mirrors in the Jeep than on a motorcycle, the field of view was too small to be usable. Also, they looked kinda goofy (sorry, no pics). I might have lived with the aesthetics if they had been more functional but they just weren't usable.

At this point, I considered these much larger motorcycle mirrors that I had ruled out the first time because I didn't want chrome. I was tempted to buy them anyway and just paint them black but I finally came full circle back and decided to just get some factory YJ/TJ mirrors that the extension arms were designed for. I was tempted to spend the money for new ones because my Jeep is only 1 year old after all but I decided to get used ones on Ebay. When they arrived, they were pretty rough and were oxidized pretty badly but I had purchased some black spray paint for the extension arms anyway so I cleaned them up and put a fresh coat of paint on them. Also, one of them came without the OEM bracket but the other one was a pain in the a$$ to get out of the bracket. I wound up taking it to a mechanic friend of mine who cut quite a bit of material out of the bracket enough to release the tension on the threads so it would come out.

FINALLY! :rockon: They look good and they're rock solid. I can't detect any wind noise or vibration on the road. They're actual Jeep mirrors so they look right and are big enough to be functional. They even have the jeep logos on the glass which makes them look even more at home. Also, the extension arms move them far enough back that the passenger mirror is completely usable even when the soft doors are on. Here's the final result:


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