Hi, I just thought I'd share my experience of repairing my folding mirror. I clipped another mirror in a narrow street. Really not very hard but enough to break the motor/gearbox part, meaning the mirror just flapped about. The only other damage was a small crack in the indicator lens. I thought that it would require an entire new unit but I was able to take it all apart to get the motor and gearbox unit out. Search on this site or the web for how to clip the mirror cover off. After that, it's all very straight forward to get apart. The damaged motor looked like this:
As you can see the gear box is totally smashed and the gears have fallen out. Despite this it was easy enough to Araldite it together. I then used bits of wire sunk into more glue to reinforce the casing. The gear teeth required a bit of work with a fine file so they ran well again. Then I put it back together. The only difficulty here was squeezing it up tight enough so the hinge pin could be put back in. I used a cable-tie tourniquet to pull it up before tapping the pin back in. I put it back on the car and all has worked smoothly for the last 2 months.
Since doing this I've spotted that you can get new, genuine MB motors for about £50, so even if you smash yours and the motor isn't repairable, then I can vouch for the motor replacement being straight forward.
-g
As you can see the gear box is totally smashed and the gears have fallen out. Despite this it was easy enough to Araldite it together. I then used bits of wire sunk into more glue to reinforce the casing. The gear teeth required a bit of work with a fine file so they ran well again. Then I put it back together. The only difficulty here was squeezing it up tight enough so the hinge pin could be put back in. I used a cable-tie tourniquet to pull it up before tapping the pin back in. I put it back on the car and all has worked smoothly for the last 2 months.
Since doing this I've spotted that you can get new, genuine MB motors for about £50, so even if you smash yours and the motor isn't repairable, then I can vouch for the motor replacement being straight forward.
-g