New Mirror On The Concours
Now all I had to do was figure out how to mount it.
I tried to find a used mirror at Steele’s–with no luck–and when I looked on the Concours Owners Group forum to see if anyone was parting a bike out I found one note that said “don’t waste everyone’s time asking for a used mirror, just buy one from Murph’s.” So I did.
By the time the new mirror arrived I had pretty well figured out what I needed to do. First I needed to remove the windshield, which was easily accomplished by removing the screws along its base. Easy enough. Then I needed to remove one screw just inside the base of the windshield, which was now reachable because the windshield was off. Then reach in each of the two pockets in the fairing and take out one screw in each spot. Theoretically the dashboard of the fairing then comes off. In reality, that took some jockeying and trial and error. Plus, I was concerned about getting it back on again. But I managed.
Now I’ve got access to the mounting bolts.
Then it was a simple job to undo the two bolts holding the mirror assembly onto the fairing. And it turned out not to be difficult to put it back together. Could it really be this easy?
No. I now had the new mirror on but it would hardly move. That armature within the accordion boot connecting the mirror to the fairing was supposed to allow the mirror to be moved in and out, up and down, and rotated on its axis. It would not do these things. Now what?
Here’s what broke. That ball and socket are supposed to allow the movement of the mirror.
Here’s where logic and common sense come into play. To get inside I had had to first disassemble the mirror housing. There is a deep cup and a thin border piece. I slipped a thin screw driver between the two and popped them apart, then popped the mirror itself out. Now I could remove the bolt that attaches the housing to the armature.
The rubber boot was like a bag with the open end at the mirror side and at the fairing side there were just two holes in the bottom of the bag for the attaching bolts. To get inside I had to come from the mirror side. Peeling back the boot gave me access to the big nut.
This was very good. At first I had thought I might need to take the fairing apart again but when I saw all this it meant I would not need to do that. Phew!
So I loosened that nut a bit and tried flexing the armature. Sure enough, it moved the way it is supposed to. Hooray! Then it was just a matter of reassembling the housing. But that didn’t want to work.
The thin border piece that was supposed to snap onto the deep cup would not hold. Close examination showed that what holds those two pieces together are small tabs on the cup side that a lip on the border side is supposed to slip over. When I had popped the border piece off it apparently had not just slipped over the tabs, it had broken many of them off. Dang.
At this point I was ready to just get it done, so I took some small strips of the Gorilla Tape I had used to temporarily fix the broken mirror and used them to hold the two housing pieces together in strategic spots. Kludgey once again but I can live with it. And now I’ve got two functioning mirrors again.
Biker Quote for Today
No therapy in the world can do what burning a tank of gas, chasing the setting sun can do for you.
Tags: kawasaki concours
