I was asked recently what the mirrors on my car were off of. I then realized I had never added this part of my build to my blog, hence the post now.
Its always been difficult to find mirrors that fit and suit the Nova due to the steep angle rake of the roof line, both front and sides plus the unusual shape itself of the mounting position options. Rear visibility in the Nova has always been an issue and also adjusting mirrors as you can't get to them once in the car. So I ended up using some electric Buick Century mirror from the USA as my starting point as I liked the organic shape and they were large enough to provide good rear visibility.
I carried out all of the shaping work in Singapore, 6000 miles away from the car so I had to start by making a mockup of the roof angle and shape thanks to drawings and measurements supplied by my parents.
As you can see once the mirror was at the right angle to the roof and ground the existing mount wasn’t going to work.
So step one was cut away most of the existing mount and use fiberglass filler to create a rough shape and fill in the gap between the roof line and the mirror mount. I also encased some threaded sleeves into the fiberglass for fitting points to bolt into once on the car.
The finish is rough but this was just to get the basic shape
The next step was to start to shape the new fiberglass mount with a course rasp file to get it to match the lines of the window based on my drawings. Then next sandpaper to remove the score marks from the rasp.
Once the new mount shape was finished you can see the difference between the original and new mounts.
Next step was to repeat for the other side
Once I got the mirrors back to the UK I could trial fit them to the car, thankfully they fitted perfectly first time with only some minor shaping of the underside to match the body contours.
Finally once painted to match the body colour they looked like they were made for the car.
