(Pictured above: The donor mirror on the left and the newly replaced mirror, ready for install on the right)
"Hero is probably too strong a word", Pippus said. "People throw that term around way too loosely in my opinion, I will let history decide how it wants to remember me. I think a statue would allow people to gaze on it and come up with their own words" he mused.
"I have to give a lot of the credit to my father-in-law, to be honest. Many times, when he was faced with difficult situation, he would quote a co-worker who liked to say 'God hates a coward!' Those words of semi-wisdom kept ringing in my head and - in the end - it all worked out".
The procedure involved taking a rearview mirror from a parts car and replacing the actual mirror in it with the mirror from another one that was found in the project car.
"I looked at it several times and determined that the mirrors were exactly the same shape. Having never heard of this procedure before, I was unsure whether it would work, but my team and I just took it step by step".
The procedure became necessary when Pippus determined that the mirror from the parts car part was too far gone. "The silver was coming off the back making a bunch of lines across the field of vision. I am getting old and my hair is getting a little thin, so I did not want to look in that mirror and see a bunch of lines on my face too" Pippus said. "I had to do something!"
Working with very small screwdrivers, Pippus carefully rolled back the plastic edge on the found mirror and then worked to pry it off the plastic backing. "It was glued pretty good. I wasn't sure I was going to get it out without breaking it", he said.
Once it was out, he moved on to the mirror from the parts car. "This one was glued in a lot tighter, so I worked even more carefully with it...... until I realized that I did not need this one at all..... and then I grabbed a hammer and smashed it into millions of pieces..... most of which ended up in my hands!"
The next step - after First Aid - was to take the good mirror and wedge it into the frame of the one from the parts car.
"This part went fairly well. Truth be told, I thought about the fact that I had just smashed a mirror which some say should bring me 7 years bad luck and I was prepared to see the entire endeavor end in failure, but, fortunately, I dodged that bullet".
Summing up this momentous event, Pippus mused, "Some may read this and think, 'What a cheapskate!!!! Just go buy a new mirror!!!!! There are like 9438678468765 of them on Ebay!!!....... but my response is, 'Where is the adventure in that? How does the science of car repair get advanced with that attitude? What if Sir Edmund Hillary looked at Mount Everest and said - Bah! Who cares? I took a risk here and I think it paid off.......... beside, I am a cheapskate!" :)
Pippus noted that he has cleared his entire weekend calendar to accommodate the media frenzy that he expects to erupt now that the story has been confirmed. "I thought Jimmy Fallon had called this morning..... but it turned out to be someone asking if I wanted my furnace cleaned. His name was James - which is a form of Jimmy - so, clearly, it is just a matter of time!"
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