After all the help you guys have given me, I'm glad to finally have the opportunity to give something back.
My passenger sideview mirror stopped darkening a couple weeks ago. After going through all the obligatory threads on Toyota forums about whether I was even imagining that it darkened in the first place (apparently most Toyotas only darken the driver's side), I finally took a leap of faith and pulled it apart. The mirror surface itself comes off the assembly very easily, with no tools. You just pull it out at the outer edge and the four little clamps release. There's a tiny harness that carries the 0 - 5vdc that tells the mirror how much it should darken, and two other wires that carry the heating current. Once you release the tiny harness and the two heating wires, you can work on it on the bench. In my case, the circled wire's soldering connection corroded and failed.
I cleaned the pad and the wire off with some steel wool and contact cleaner, fluxed it and soldered it back together. Reattached the wires, snapped the mirror back into its four clamps and it worked again.
The mirror is the same part number for LC's and GX460's. Some quick googling shows it to be under $200, but that's $200 I can use for something else now.
My passenger sideview mirror stopped darkening a couple weeks ago. After going through all the obligatory threads on Toyota forums about whether I was even imagining that it darkened in the first place (apparently most Toyotas only darken the driver's side), I finally took a leap of faith and pulled it apart. The mirror surface itself comes off the assembly very easily, with no tools. You just pull it out at the outer edge and the four little clamps release. There's a tiny harness that carries the 0 - 5vdc that tells the mirror how much it should darken, and two other wires that carry the heating current. Once you release the tiny harness and the two heating wires, you can work on it on the bench. In my case, the circled wire's soldering connection corroded and failed.
I cleaned the pad and the wire off with some steel wool and contact cleaner, fluxed it and soldered it back together. Reattached the wires, snapped the mirror back into its four clamps and it worked again.
The mirror is the same part number for LC's and GX460's. Some quick googling shows it to be under $200, but that's $200 I can use for something else now.
