I want to add heat mats to the mirror glasses of my rear view mirrors. The van is the plain jane cargo variant with manual mirrors.
How do I get the glasses off without destroying them?

 

That's exceptionally difficult especially for those not in the auto glass business---it's even tough for those of us in that biz. Because the mirrors fit so closely to their mounting bases and those are inside the larger mirror head its nearly impossible getting any sort of release agent or solvent into the areas most needing it, the hope to loosen the bonding material enough to remove the mirror unbroken.

If you can secure replacement mirror elements only that's your best approach---simply smash the existing mirrors out, remove every bit of broken glass and adhesive padding first.

Run your wiring from inside the door shells through the mirror stems and make all connections to power and grounds, testing them for proper voltage. It would be a good idea to have the heater mats plugged into the power source which allows you to test the entire set up before attaching the heater pads to the mirror elements.

I have a mirror head without glass I can photograph and show how it goes together if that would be helpful Karsten?

BTW mirror elements for the pedestal-type mirrors cost me something like $12 USD each in case you can't find them locally.

HTH

 

Ok, that's what I suspected. Seems that Ford used all of it's high tech 3M tape to bond the glass into the bases. Guess I'll wait until one breaks and replace them with a new set of folding mirrors with easy replaceable glasses. They pop up on eBay in Germany from time to time for around 80 bucks each.
Shipping cost would kill the 12$ though.
But thanks for the offer anyway!