(273): The Heartbreak of Upside Down and Backwards
For Erika Sauter’s 365 prompt: Write about something you’ve recently researched and your findings.

This evening, I had the great joy to ride in my husband’s new old tank (car); it has a little trouble getting up to speed and sometimes stalls out while braked, but there is nothing like the feeling of sitting inside of a true heavy duty Detroit-made V8, running full out at 65 mph (it has trouble going any faster).
So this is the love of his life, and he takes care of her to the best of his ability, although it isn’t what you’d call a show car. He was adjusting the rear view mirror on it a couple weeks ago, and it came off in his hand. So he bought some glue to re-attach the little button that holds the mirror assembly to the glass. Without reading the instructions, he simply glued the side that had been against the glass back to the glass and allowed it to set.
Then he realized that something was wrong. The mirror is held to the button by a screw that fits into a dimple on the button — a dimple he remembered being on the side of the button he had glued to the glass! Nothing would do but I had to order a new button. The instructions on the glue said that you can glue a new button on top of the old button and attach the mirror assembly to that. But when I called the man at Autozone, he told me that this was a dangerous thing to do and could result in windshield cracking or breakage.
That would not do! So I’ve been looking around on the internet (dangerous thing to do). The methods I’ve found are many and varied:
*Wet a cotton ball with acetone and dissolve the glue around the edges; keep working the button until it slides off, or pop it off.
*Use a lighter or small flamed torch to apply heat to the metal (the button itself) until the glue begins to melt and the button will fall off. Can also hold the button with pliers to move/slide it off once warm enough.
*Take a piece of wire and work it up under the button and scrape bits of the glue off underneath it until it can be removed.
*Use the wire method, only with dental floss.
*Use a razor blade in a pair of vise grips; slide the sharp edge across the glass and strike the glue several times. Button will eventually come off.
*Use methyl ethyl ketone (butanone) solvent on the button until it comes off, making sure to take respiratory and skin protection precautions, of course.
*And this fellow’s instructions are worth quoting in full: “You’ll break the windshield if you expose it to a thermal shock. The trick is heating the surrounding area initially to spread the heat and proceed to make the glue to flow or melt. Make a sweeping movement or stroke of the dryer over the ‘button’. Keep the dryer moving all the time and you’ll remove the button in seconds. You don’t need to heat the glass per se but need to break the bond between the glass and the ‘button’. The epoxy glue has a much lower Tg than glass (Si). Tg stands for thermal glass transition temperature.”
It seems that there is some danger of ruining the entire windshield with this procedure, and some folks have pulled the button off and ended up taking a chunk out of the glass of the windshield by accident! So I think we’ll be very, very circumspect about trying these methods.
As for gluing another button on top of the incorrectly applied on on the windshield, some people (even professionals) have done this with no problem, and the mirror attached just fine and stayed on. Others have had the mirror fall off with this arrangement.
I guess we’ll have to try something if we want to re-attach the rear view mirror. The guy at Autozone said to simply glue the second button on near the first one and attach the mirror to the second one, leaving the first one sitting there as a testament to the error of our ways. But my husband thinks that’s sloppy and unsightly, so we’ll no doubt be trying one of these other methods or asking any random mechanic we run across in the next few days.
So this post is only in partial fulfillment of the prompt to research and present findings. I’ve gathered a group of potential methods for solving my problem, but as of right now, none have been implemented. My findings are this: be really f-ing careful, because it’s really f-in easy to break the windshield while trying to remove that pesky rear view mirror mounting button. So that’s it for tonight, folks!

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