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M5 Mirror Install 

I managed to get a real set of M5 mirrors off a wrecked 93 M5.  I had looked at replicas before but the real deal had several advantages including unequal length (longer driver side), factory fitment, they were already painted alpine white and they should have been easy to fit.  Here you can find out how I was wrong about most of this...

I paid $400 including shipping for the two mirrors.  The mirrors arrived nicely wrapped and exactly as the seller promised.  Included were the foam seals, the mounting bolts and the wiring harness/motors.  We had discussed their condition and deemed them "respectable".  They were well taken care of but had suffered a lot of stone chips.  The drivers side was especially bad.  The glass was near perfect though, so that was a big plus.

I went outside one night to try to put them on and realized that since they came off a 93 they were Alpine White III which is considerably "whiter" than my Alpine White II.  The decision to repaint was made.  I spent $200 bucks and got a beautiful layer of Alpine White II sprayed.  I had my car in the bodyshop for another unrelated repair and the mechanic was nice enough to try and put on the mirrors for me.  Unfortunately the connects were different (see below).  This made no sense as both mirrors were non-memory and BMW factory parts.  I did not see the connectors at this point.  The bodyshop wanted another $200 to break apart the mirrors and swap the motors and harness from my stockers into the new ones.  Since this "small upgrade" was already up to $600 I decided not to go this route.  There had to be another way.

So I brought the mirrors home where they decorated my kitchen counter for a week.  Jon K said he'd help me figure out the wiring.  So I drove out to Newtown PA and started hacking the wiring.

Removal of the mirrors was easy.  Pry off the cover on the screw holding in the tweeter on the door pillar.  Unscrew the tweeter.  There is a plastic clip at the top.  Use a little gentle force to pull out the grill and tweeter all at once.  Unscrew the small silver screw inside.  Remove the plastic trim.  Using a 6mm hex key, unscrew the single screw holding on the mirror.  We managed to strip the drivers side screw head pretty nicely but jammed the key in hard and finally got it out.  See the crappy stripped head below.

The mirror comes off.  Now, you can see a connector between the body wiring and mirror.  Shown below is mine (on top).  On the bottom is the M5 connector.

My connector is such a waste of supplies.  It can accept ten pins but only uses four.  What a waste.  We cut it off on the body side and shortened the wiring as there was much more there than required.  We then confirmed that the four colored wires on my mirrors and the new mirrors were the same.  We guessed that they served the same function (thankfully we were right).

We looked at the old connector and figured out which mirror wire went to which body wire.  The chart below sums it up.

We then soldered the connections and wrapped them with heat shrink tubing.  Everything worked so we replaced the mirrors and tweeter.  With the M5 mirrors, my car has style and 20 more horsepower :-).  It's a tradeoff I'm willing to make for significantly less rearward visibility.

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