Talbot / Bullet style side view mirrors

[patrickt]

This particular job is really, really easy. And it will turn your $50 knock-off in to a $500 Talbot for less than a hundred bucks. But, the reason I originally did the surgery on the knock-off was because I was not sure: 1) That the existing bolted fastener doohickey to the fender well on the knock-off would match exactly to a true Talbot; and 2) I could see the bolt just begging to be dropped down in to the inner fender between the outer wall and the inner wall. And if that happened, I'm not really sure what I would do as I did not see an easy way to deal with that little problem. So, I ordered a very high-quality, “slightly convex,” 90mm replacement mirror from Aardvark International, the US distributor for the German company Talbot. I also ordered the replacement internal spring, cork, and white outer gasket for the true Talbot mirror. Here's what you do: Take the mirror apart by removing the single back screw. The inner housing, that holds the mirror, rotates in all directions in the outer housing (that is how you adjust the mirror) and it comes out completely with the screw removed. Then I removed the existing mirror from the inner housing, along with the cheap internal parts, and replaced them with the Talbot parts. I sealed the white wire gasket around the perimeter with silicone, used dental floss to compress the internal spring and cork through the back screw hole, and then sealed the mirror in with silicone. After 36 hours I untied the dental floss thereby releasing the internal spring and cork to press up against the mirror. It looks absolutely perfect. The optical quality of the mirror is remarkable. You can actually “see through it,” yet it is still a mirror, with convex properties to help avoid the blind spots. Allowing light to pass through the mirror helps reduce glare at night from other cars’ head lamps. The pics below show the difference in convexness between the new mirror, and the cheap stick-on mirror that I had been using. Also shown is the compressed spring and cork contained in the inner housing, how it is compressed and sitting in a glass waiting for the mirror to be fastened in to it. The mirror after it was siliconed to the inner housing, and the finished product as mounted to the car. Unless you were a Talbot mirror concours judge, you would never be the wiser....