What determines the traveling limit of the down movement of the side view mirrors when the car is put in reverse? Is it determined by resistance or is there a setting in some module somewhere?

This evening I decided I was going to put an end to the noise the passenger side mirror had been making. I had neglected it for a while. I took it apart to grease that "ball joint" on the actuator with some white lithium grease. It definitely needed some grease! As I was putting everything back together, I put to much pressure on the glass and ended up manually resetting the actuator by a lot. While the memory settings are working as expected the reverse down limit is about half of what is was this afternoon. Now I have to manually adjust the mirror to be able to see the curb on the passenger side.

I took it apart once again to make sure I had not overtightened the center screw on the actuator. The screw was good. I also moved that mirror right-left and up-down a good number of times thinking that might be the way to set the limits. No luck!

 

isnt it just a gear?
the mirror travels on the gear...there must be a stop on the gear

 

Pretty sure it is electrical resistance. There is a small circuit board with two sliders that connect to the mirror. Those sliders have contacts that move along traces on the board. Somehow, this feeds the mirror position info somewhere.

 

I am going to try to open the actuator and reset the worm gear and/or the contacts.

 

My 2004 Acura TL has the automatic mirror adjustment that functions every time you put the car in reverse. It moves down to let you see the curb while you are backing up. It then moves back to its normal position while driving forward. If your car doesn't do that properly, you may want to see this post to fix it: https://acurazine.com/forums/3g-tl-p...-045-a-832020/