1979-85 Lighted Visor Fix

[smokuspollutus]

Hi everyone, this is my first post here. I don't have a Riviera but figured I'd pass this information along to those here who have a 79-85 E-body. Here's what I posted regarding a fix for the sun visors with lighted mirrors on that era car on my 1984 Eldorado's thread over on the Cadillac board. Michael Vanderberg from the Reatta AACA site really helped me out here, so a big thanks to him. Hope this helps someone who's experiencing this problem!

 

Anthony

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Bad weather is here again and the car has been sitting since just before Christmas. So I figured it to be as good a time as any to fix something that was really irking the crap out of me…the sun visors.

All of the 79-85 Eldorado’s with light up mirrors (which most had) unfortunately have a problem with visorus saginitus. The visor is held up by a small winged plastic bushing-it wraps around the chrome visor arm, and locks into the plastic visor body with the winged part. This little plastic thing gets brittle over time and starts to crack, losing its grip on the stationary rod. This starts as an issue where they droop a little bit when the car has been sitting in the sun on a summers day but eventually gets bad enough that it happens at all temperatures and will just flop down with bumps in the road.
 
To my knowledge there’s no replacements for this winged bushing and even if there were I don’t know how you would go about replacing it with the way it’s installed on the visor arm. GM evidently saw the problem as the arm and bushing were revised in 1984 to be bigger but evidently to no avail-the passenger visor on my car sagged from the time I had bought the car and I had held it in place with a nail wedged into the metal trim surrounding the window that had to be removed when you wanted to use it…this didn’t compute with the fairer sex, so it’s safe to say eventually I’m going to find all of those finishing nails that have gone missing over the past couple of years the hard way…
My driver’s side visor was free of this problem but I just didn’t use it as I was afraid it would start doing the same thing. So I set to work finding a real fix

These popped up for sale on ebay, red visors from an ’87 DeVille. They looked like a winner, same general shape, same color and in good condition. After a couple of messages to get an idea on size, I ordered them. However, when they arrived, they were neither the bright red shown in the pictures, nor in as good of repair. They definitely needed to be reupholstered to be used. I gave them a dry run before wasting any more money, and they had a couple of other issues. The first was a different electrical connector which was no biggie. The second was much bigger, that they could only be used to block sun going forward. Trying to move it to the side caused them to either drop or raise at a 45 degree angle.

I figured this was caused by the design of the mount which is heavily angled. So there wasn’t much I could do about it. Until my ebay suggestions came up with visors from a Buick Reatta for sale-the same general style as the DeVille, but with a flat type of mount similar to the OEM Eldorado!

Now the guy wanted over 100 dollars for these and after my blunder with the DeVille visors I wasn’t about to sink that type of change in a maybe. So I headed over to the Reatta AACA message board to see if anyone had a dogged set of visors with good mounts that they wanted to sell, and the first post in the for sale section happened to be by a fella who was parting out a complete Reatta! Score!
I emailed the guy and he explained that the car was in a junkyard local to his house. A real gentleman, he was able to get the visor arms for free and didn’t even charge me the ride up from Florida. Thanks Mike! The car in question had a burgundy interior so the arms would need to be sprayed dark carmine to work for me. After cleaning and priming, SEM aerosol made quick work of that. 

Unfortunately when they were removed from the Reatta, this condom thing that wraps around a metal bushing shredded, but I was able to basically replicate it with heat shrink tubing

The arms are easily removed from the visors when uninstalled from the car. Simply rotate the arm into the mirror side of the visor (as if you were pushing the visor back up into the roof) until it clicks and then yank it out. Install it into the new visor in the same position. I did some tests for proof of concept and when it seemed like I was on the right track, I got to work. Or at least to spending money. I ordered carmine foam-backed headliner material (Sunbrite 1872 for those interested, it was a great match) and headliner adhesive (which I ended up not needing for this job)
The visors themselves are like a clamshell and probably harder to crack open than a turnip. After enough brute force, a hammer, and a screwdriver, I was able to get them open (see the color difference as compared to the ebay picture above)


The material around the visor ended up not being glued to the face of it, only tucked tight and hot glued from the factory. I decided to do the same thing (So I have to write off the spray adhesive until I do a new headliner). I carefully removed the old fabric and made a template out of the new material

(should anyone do this in the future, it’s much more simple and less risky to only cut the general shape of the template out, you can cut the hole for the mirror and sun shade later)
The visors themselves also needed some help. The “ears” at the ends were super fatigued and loose, so I mixed up some resin and fiberglass to shore them up. 

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Once the visor bodies were sound, I had to come up with a way of re-joining the clamshell. I have no idea how GM did this in the first place but super glue doesn’t work. After a lot of searching I found out that these are likely made of Polyethylene. I bought 3M DP8005 adhesive which claimed to bond it and tested it on a junk visor-seemed to do the trick. You need a special mixing tip in addition to this and I also had to get a gun that it fits into.
With that solved, I started hot gluing the material onto the visors. I had never done anything with headliner material before aside from stapling them up when they started sagging and I was really surprised with how compliant it was. In that, it basically looked factory with no runs or wrinkles despite not having a clue what I was doing. 

Then, I bonded the two halves back together. Each one had to sit like this for a day, and early signs seem like it worked. Hopefully the adhesive will hold, time and temperature will tell.

Here’s a comparison of the original visors with the DeVille replacements. Mirrors swapped without issue. I also had to swap the power connector, meaning I had to cut the crimped on connector at the mirror end from the old visors and install in the new ones. Delphi 12020347 is the connector part, there’s no room inside the assembly for a butt connector (and I hate using them unless I have to)

And here they are installed!

The only complication on the install is that the plastic visor arms bolt in a slightly smaller bolt pattern than the originals. You can take any 2 of the 3 holes but not all 3 at once. Fortunately there’s plenty of meat to drill into to make another hole, without any chance of drilling through the roof (the visors screw into a separate piece of metal from the main roof panel)

I’m sure a lot of people are reading this right now and saying I should have just stuck with the nail but in reality it wasn’t that bad. It might seem like a mess but everything above is a “worse possible scenario” in that I got fleeced on the visors I bought and had to change color, structurally repair them, rehab the Reatta visor arms, then bond them back together. If you’re fortunate enough to have a 79-85 E body with an interior color the same as an 85-88 Deville, and can get the visors from it, the only thing you need do is get a set of Reatta visor arms and swap them out (and obviously your electrical connector from your 79-85). They’re really close in size as far as fit, and look factory with the exception of the sunshade. You could delete that when reupholstering, but I always liked them.
It seems like GM changed all their lighted visor designs to basically the same thing in the late 80’s downsized cars. So there might very well be more vehicles than just Reattas that have the flat plastic visor arm. As far as longevity, I’ll definitely keep everyone posted but I will say that I’ve never really seen any of the “newer” Cadillacs or Buicks experiencing visor problems. The whole metal bushing with condom setup also feels much more sturdy then the OEM 79-85 stuff. 

Oh, and on the plus side, I’ll only have to wear these puppies at night now.