How To Upgrade Tow Mirrors 2001-02 GMC Sierra Part 1

Brought to you by 1AAuto.com, your source for quality replacement parts and the best service on the Internet. Hi, I'm Mike Green. I'm one of the owners of 1A Auto. I want to help you save time and money preparing and maintaining your vehicle. I'm going to use my 20 plus years of experience restoring and repairing cars and trucks like this, to show you the correct way to install parts from 1AAuto.com. The right parts installed correctly, that's going to save you time and money. Thank you and enjoy the video.

In this video were going to show you how to upgrade your 99 to 02 Chevy or GMC truck paddle-style mirrors like you see here, to these larger extendable tow-style mirrors. If you look closely on the mirrors on this truck that we put on, you'll see that they actually have a lens on the side of them which is an LED running light and signal. So again, here is the paddle-style mirror. The OE style from the front, and then the upgraded tow-style here. Okay and on this truck we put this chrome style on which is kind of a prototype, actually with the white. I think maybe the black would be better, but this chrome would probably look nice on a black truck or on a darker color. Okay, so were going to speed through taking the door panel off, if you want to see this in regular motion, check out our video for 99 to 02 Silverado Sierra door panel replacement, or you can probably pick up enough here to get the job done. Once the door panel is off you'll want to pull the water shield back, pull that harness through, and then the speaker actually comes out just with a clip. Then unplug the speaker.

Now you want to pull the insulation from that mirror area. There is a clip for the heater to this truck, it has power-heating mirrors. So you can just use your thumb, pull back the tab, and disconnect that clip. Then were going to fast forward here. You want to remove the three 10-millimeter bolts that hold the mirror on. Now for the factory assembly there's a little clip that holds the mirror there, so you just press that and then pull the mirror off. So just make sure you feed the wires through, the mirror comes off, and there it is out. So here's our stock mirror, the new towing-style mirror. This one happens to be chrome. We offer them in chrome and black. Everything's going to hook up on the mirror as far as the power and the heat goes, it's going to hook up just the same. I'll show you how to hook up the signal lights and running lights on the side. So feed those harnesses through that middle hole. Then you just line up the studs and pull the mirror through.

Okay, then we'll start one of the bolts on, and then fast forward from there. Then when you tighten this up, you want the bolts nice and snug. You don't want them too tight. You don't want to break the base or anything, but get them fairly snug, fairly tight. Then the power and the heat plug right in. Okay so before we wire it, here's our mirror mounted. This mirror has a side clearance option, so the lower is the side clearance and the upper is the turn signal, depending on the mirror you order, you may or may not have all those options. You may just have a mirror that just has the turn signal or you may buy a mirror that has no signals in it at all. We offer them many ways. You're going to have three new leads. Your short black lead is going to be your ground. You'll have a longer lead, this one happens to be black and it may be a different color depending on the mirror, that is your running light lead, or sorry, your main light lead. Then you're going to have a long, long red lead which will run across your dash which is your signal lead. Now this is a prototype so you can see I don't have ends on here.

This will usually come with a loop on it, but you're going to just loosen this stop right here, and put your ground runner there. So this is a 10-millimeter bolt right here. Just loosen it up a little bit. Okay, as I'm tightening it up there, you might want to scratch some of the paint off the back of the door just where you connect the ground onto it. That will help it get a good solid ground. What you're going to wire into is, when you turn your lights on there's a little light in your power window switch that comes on. So there is a light circuit into this connector that provides power to that, and that's what you want to hook it to. Will you turn the lights on please? Okay, so what you want to find is a brown wire, a small brown wire ... okay lights off.

So this small brown wire right here that is your light circuit. So once you've determined the wire that you want to tap into, and you've run your other wire, you want to use a wiretap. How this works is if you can see in, you see that one side is blocked off and the other side passes though. So in your harness, the wire that you want to tap into, you just kind of put the tap right on to it, on the side that passes through. Then you take the wire that you want to tap into and you just insert it, and make sure it goes all the way down and in. Then you take a pair of pliers and you push that down and in, and walk it. So that gives you a nice secure tap and there's no ends or anything that can get shorted out.

Okay, what I'm pointing to here is I took the tap back off and that's just a little nick in the wire that it leaves. That's all it does to your wire, so if you ever wanted to take your mirrors off for whatever, all you would have to do is just put a little tiny piece of electrical tape on there and it's all set. It doesn't do any damage at all to your harness or anything like that. Okay, lights on. Lights off. Lights on. So you can see your running light is working just fine. Then once you have it working, what you'll want to do is use some zip-ties or some electrical tape and just make sure you secure that wire that runs the running light with your harness. This will plug in with no problem and your wire's not coming out. Now what you need to do is you take your long red wire, feed it down into the door.

Then you'll want to pull your sill-plate up, then pull your kick panel here. It's coming off this side. Then your kick panel pulls right off that. Now what you're going to do is feed your wire right through this rubber boot so it comes out on the inside of the truck. Often the easiest way to do that is there are these little tabs on this boot, so you can pull it off and lead the wire though here. Now what we have is, here's your conduit between the door. So you want to take it and basically kind of smoosh it together so its straight, like that. Then take a piece of stiff wire and run it right down through. The stiff wire comes out this end here, take and loop it around onto itself. You've got your wire through and now take your red wire and put it right through. Give yourself plenty of slack, then just grab back on to the grommet again, straighten it right out like that, hold it and gently pull that wire right up through. Then the final step, is just put it right through and pull it all the way through. Then clip that back on and clip that back on. Okay so that ends part one. Part two, we go through running the wire thought he dash and connecting the leads into the main harness so that your signal lights work.

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