[Rushil_27]

Hello, this will be a write-up on how to fix the side mirror glass of an F-chassis Bmw that isn’t tilting, even though you can hear the motor running.

In my case I bought the cheap smoked sequential side markers and after putting everything back together I noticed my mirrors weren’t moving. (I tilted the mirror glass up to pop it off, but after putting the glass back on the mirror was stuck and I could hear the motor whirring but nothing happening.


1. To start, push your mirror to face it up and take a trim tool (the wider the better) and pry up from the bottom. If you aren’t able to push or electronically move it to face up, that’s fine just carefully put a trim tool in the bottom gap and pry slowly up until the mirror glass frees itself from the clips on the motor.

2. After that take the mirror glass off slowly (you may have to rock it up and down gently to get it fully off the motor). I like to keep my window open and rest it on the interior door panel being mindful of the wires attached to the glass and to not scratch the paint.

3. Then you will have to remove the small torx screw in the center of the mirror motor. It’s a T10. Gently remove it so it doesn’t strip and set it aside.

4. Once the screw is out you will have to take off the mirror caps. There’s 3 sets of clips (circled) that you must pinch together and simultaneously pull from the edge of the mirror cap to free it from the housing. What worked for me was starting from the outer edge. I used one hand to undo the clips while pulling the cap with the other and keeping tension to undo the other clips.

5. After pulling off the mirror caps you will notice that the mirror motor is loose, but not free to come out. This is because there are 2 tabs on the mirror cap side that need to be pushed in. I used a trim tool to push those tabs in towards the middle (they’re a bit stiff) and pull out the motor slowly.

6. When the motor is removed, there is still one step to finally free it from the car. There’s a plug on the back that has to be removed. I didn’t find any clip to remove the plug, just pulled and wiggled at it with patience until it came off.

7. Now that the mirror motor is fully off the car, you can inspect it. On mine the mirror “ball” area came out of the socket. I forgot to get a picture of it, but there was a gap between the ball and socket. Carefully use a small flathead screwdriver or trim tool to bend up the rectangular tabs and push the ball back into the socket.
This is what is causing the mirror to not move. The ball isn’t able to move since it came out of the socket and is stuck on the edge of it.

8. After carefully reseating the ball into the socket, I used some wd-40 and sprayed it on a napkin and rubbed it on the ball and moved it around the socket until I got all of the areas. In some cases the dust and dirt buildup will restrict and slow down movement of the mirror when trying to adjust it.

9. That’s it, before fully tidying everything up, I plugged in the motor into the plug and loosely put it back in the housing to test that it was moving and working fine. Now you can button everything back up in the reverse order.

This completely fixed my passenger side mirror which wouldn’t move at all, but my driver side mirror still has trouble moving left and right and only really tilts if I use my finger to “help” it. I think I could have broken something in the motor itself, but it seems to work good enough for me since I don’t adjust my mirrors everyday.


Last pic is from this thread I found on Bimmerpost which helped me figure out what was wrong.

Hope this helps, thx for reading