Haynes' World is a regular feature that takes a look at what the staff at Haynes are doing with their cars, bikes and other vehicles. This time, Euan Doig has an update on his Skoda Yeti and its detached door mirror glass.
Car: Skoda Yeti
Owner: Euan Doig
When I bought my Yeti back in September, I was pretty chuffed that I’d managed to find such a great example. Not often do you find a 10-year-old car with just 44,000km showing, so I was pleased with my good fortune.
However, that has already climbed to 55,000 because my elderly father had a fall in November and so I’ve spent much of the past two months trawling several hundred kilometers up and down the motorway between southern England and Scotland.
Still, apart from the rapidly rising number on the odometer, you wouldn’t know it, because the Yeti still feels as tight and rattle-free as the day I picked it up. It has given me complete peace of mind during a busy couple of months.
That calmness is at least partly down to the fact that after getting the car I gave it a complete service, with new oil and filter, new plugs and three new wiper blades. It’s running properly sweetly now.
Yetis are pretty rare things on the used market down under, which is a bit of a mystery because it's a great model: it's well suited to life in Australia and NZ, with a spacious, practical interior, and has a variety of petrol and diesel engines. Some models have four-wheel drive, too.
The Yeti, like other models in the Skoda range, borrows its underpinnings from Volkswagen Group models, so getting hold of parts shouldn't be an issue.
Wing mirror replacement or repair?
The only other piece of maintenance I’ve had to carry out was to the passenger-side door mirror glass, which was becoming detached. This is quite a common issue with heated mirrors, because the constant heating up and cooling down has an adverse effect on the adhesive that attaches the mirror glass to the motorised plastic mount inside the mirror housing.
It’s best to fix it sooner rather than later, because not only is it difficult to see anything behind using a trembling mirror, but it will also get to the stage where the glass will simply fall off.
It’s such an easy thing to do. Indeed, it’s a job covered in most Haynes manuals. All I had to do was adjust the mirror so that I could insert a trim removal tool behind it, then I prised the mirror mount out of the housing. I then unplugged the electrical connectors, before putting fresh adhesive behind the mirror glass.
After that, it was just a case of reattaching the wiring connectors and pressing everything back into place. Hey presto, no more wobble.