JDM power folding mirrors in July 2012

Power folding mirrors were standard equipment of Type-Rx models, as usually sold only in Japan.

Because the door of my garage is very narrow it is very difficult to back up with the mirrors folded in normal position. Having to manually fold them every time I go back home was simply too annoying. The moment I found out about the JDM folding mirrors I knew that they would by my next project.

Installing the JDM mirrors is not easy task to do because the necessary wiring is not presented in the car. I purchased the mirrors, switch box and control relay box with connectors on HK EBay as one unit for 140USD. 

JDM folding mirrors with relay box
and switch box.

Because the color did not match I decided to swap the JDM internals into my championship white painted EUDM covers. Later on I discovered that the base where the 3 bolts hold the mirror did not fit into my EUDM cover, but shaving of a material did the trick.

Before installing the internals I disassembled them, cleaned everything thoroughly, lubricated the cogs, and replaced the DC motors with new one from EBay (Mabuchi FC-280PC-22125).

Overhauled internals with new DC motor.

You can see in the picture that the mirror has 5 wires, 3 of them are for mirror adjustment, 2 are for feeding the power to the DC motor, which generates the folding movement. Those 2 additional wires have to be added on each side of the car.

The assembly of the internal mechanism can be seen in the following pictures.

Internal mechanism with dust cover fitted.

Back cover with internal mechanism fitted.

Top cover fitted.

The back side of mirror.

The mirror is press fitted on a joint.

The relay box of the folding mirrors should be installed into the driver's door. The power and ground for both folding mechanism motors can be then easily fed from the window power source. There is a lot of space in the door. I installed the relay box (the box with blue connector) inside the door as seen in this picture.

Installed relay box.

The wiring diagram looks like this.>

Wiring diagram.

You can see in the diagram that the mirrors share two additional wires A and B. These wires are not available in the car, you have to add them, or like in my case, you can reuse the speakers wires, because they go all the way through the car, through the door connector into the door. This option disables your front speakers, but in my case I had upgraded the speaker wires in 2010 and the old speakers wires were not used any longer. So I just traced the wires FL+- FR+- underneath the centre console and soldered them together.

Modifying the wiring inside the driver's door is not that complicated, you just patch in the blue connector of relay box to the stock green one and add two power wires.

The blue connector patched in.

Finished wiring inside the driver's door.

Two additional power wires for
passenger side mirror.

Job finished! The mirrors work very well. Though I noticed that the folding angle is not the same for both sides. The passenger side mirror can go a little bit further inside than the driver's mirror. There is nothing wrong with it, it is built purposely to do that.

Another observation, if you shut the engine and start it again, the folding mirror control relay resets itself. In this case when you want to fold the mirrors inwards, it is necessary to double push to control switch, otherwise folding in or out the mirrors requires only a single push of the button.

This video shows how the mirrors work (skip to 1min 15sec mark):