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My courtesy lamp lens is broken, so I gave a try to repairing it, before importing a new one from Japan or the USA.
Of the three retaining clips, only one was still good. The rear retainer was broken, and one of the two front clips was gone, too.
So I rebuilt the rear clip- Excessively big, with hindsight I'd make it much smaller.
On a micro milling machine i carved a niche to support the missing front clip and prepared two small pieces to create the 'tooth'
the rear facing retainer was glued with two components cyan glue, whereas the tooth was glued with metacrilate.
Some filing of the reconstructed front facing tooth clip is still necessary.
Like I said, the rear facing tooth is definitely oversized. Anyway, in order to make it look good, the areas around it were masked and then sandblasted with baking soda, inside and outside.
Eventually the result looks good. It could have been unnoticeable if I had chosen a different path to the rear retainer, but the soda blasting covered it up very well and, to an uneducated eye, the square blasted area could be mistaken for OEM design, especially once seated in the driver's or passengers seat.
Yes, especially when in the car, it looks like original to the unbeknownst ...
However, it looks like the original spare parts can still be sourced at very reasonable price from Mazda in Italy, and I have ordered one.
12-04-21, 09:47 AM
