WING MIRRORS

The mirrors were an ongoing issue for many, many months, and were one of the last parts that I bought for my car. The main problem was that Parallel wanted to make sure they were right before marketing them, and a long time was spent on making moulds, testing and re-moulding. There were two main issues with replicating the mirrors: 1 was that making them in fibreglass was incredibly difficult. The design is very intricate internally and 2: structurally there needed to be a fair bit of strength to be able to take the strain of the tough springs which allow them to fold back under force as required for the SVA test. Parallel spent a huge amount of time making various moulds and ended up admitting defeat. None of the fibreglass housings were deemed acceptable in terms of finish or strength and that meant using the only other option; injection moulding. Anyone that has got involved with this process knows the huge cost associated with it and in addition Parallel had to buy a pair of brand new mirrors from Lamborghini to get a decent mould from. With OE mirrors costing £1400 a pair and the substantial tooling and setup costs of replicating in plastic you could easily be looking at a total investment of some £15K. I have to take my hat of to Parallel here- thats not an insubstantial amount of money to invest in a single area or replication and one which I feel impresses me. Every other Diablo replica manufacturer I know of uses fibreglass. This is the difference between 'the norm' and how the boys at Parallel work.

The full Parallel 'mirror kit' gives you everything you need except the motors, wiring and switch-over panel which most builders will just rob from a scrapyard. So, what you get are 2x complete mirror housings (2 piece), 4x spring tubes, 4x springs, 2x motor backplates, 8x backplate fixing screws, 6x motor fixing screws, 4x rivets for holding one end of spring, 4x big washers for fitting underneath the rivets, 2x mirror glass backing plates (to give more surface area for attachment), 4x genuine rubbers that fit between the movable mirror housing and the baseplate that attaches to the door and 2x genuine mirror glass (with blue tint). Pic below shows everything except the mirror glass. IMPORTANT NOTE: It is only fair to add that the mirrors below are one of the first sets, fresh out of the mould. Parallel didn't really want to sell me these due to the poor finish but I insisted on the grounds of not wanting to wait for a better pair. Subsequent housings offered by Parallel will be virtually blemish-free and will only require minimal prep work before painting.

MAKING THEM 'WORK'

As far as I know, wing mirrors that can be moved from inside the car are necessary by law now. That can mean either manual or electrical operation but the days of being able to wind down your window and stick your finger in one of the corners of the mirror are over. Probably some Brussels Government garbage. Saying that, judging by some of the problems that old giffers have just from driving, the last thing I'd want to see them doing is taking up the other half of their dementia-racked brain cell by fiddling with something so overly complicated as window-winders and finger/mirror/eye co-ordination, probably not helped by a 3" thick tri-focal lens. Anyway, as manual operation would be a bit tricky on my car due to having fixed side wndows the easiest option is to get some electric gubbins which can be fitted into the Parallel-supplied wing mirror assemblies. The solution I used, as advised by Naz, was to use BMW 5-series (E34 model) components. The 5-Series has a compact control unit and is almost made for the Parallel door cards, although you do need to cut a hole for it. I used the whole of the internal door loom, the control switch as stated, and the motor assemblies that fit inside the mirrors. I must point out here that Andrew from Cornwall (listed in the 'links' page) managed to get hold of all this for me, and for which I am hugely grateful. Not only do I have a strong objection to walking around pikey-operated scrapyards, being sniffed in the nether regions by a stinking, salivating, grease and flea ridden Alsation but the time required to do it would just be a real pain while trying to build a car with the limited time I have. You could of course go to a BMW dealer and buy all new components but you really don't want to know the price difference between new and 'scrapyard specials'. The loom as I recieved it (through no fault of Andy's) was a bit of a mess in terms of water damage and general wiring. It had been hacked about a bit and most of the insulation had been removed, so a few hours were spent making good the loom, cleaning up all the terminals and checking it's operation. After some weird movements from the mirrors had been rectified by cleaning up all the switch contacts I finally had a fully-working set.

There looks to be a lot of wires on the picture above because I decided to keep the other BMW connectors on the sections that go inside the doors. There were two other plugs as well as the mirror plugs, and I think that these would be for the electric door lock solonoid and the electric window motor. Seeing as I am going to use solonoids as well, and may in the future end up with 'leccy windows I just decided to leave it all on there. You could make the electric mirror loom look a lot less fussy than my one if you decide to strip it of all the other crap.

Only one thing you really need to know on the electric side- the brown wire and the green with a white stripe are the earth and power. As for incorporating it into the main wiring on the car, don't make the same mistake I did. Foolishly, I just saw the back wire on my door lock solonoids and spliced it into the regular earth wire that was going to the electric motors for the mirrors. After running all the wires nicely and making good I realised that the solonoids are operated by reversing the polarity to them. Thus, I could make them shut but couldn't open them again! Luckily this was found out by testing and no real harm done but it does mean that I've got to pull ALL the wiring out that I have just done and start again because each solonoid will need to be fed with it's own wire. Not a major drama but a good 4 hours work that I really don't need to be doing again. Ho hum.

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