EK9: Window visor removal (to keep the car street legal)

Certain laws make sense, some don’t. Allegedly, it’s now illegal to have window visors installed on the car in Switzerland. Even if they are OEM H.O.P (Honda Optional Parts) that were sold here via dealerships, and were no problem for the last 15 years. Well, rules change, and if I want to keep the car on the road, I have to play by the rules and remove them. I waited as long as possible, but now I have my bi-annual MFK (= MOT / Shaken) check ahead and need to remove them.

I wanted to be very careful, since they’re not available anymore, pretty rare and expensive collectors items these days. I found a good solution to press the plastic clips out from the inside with this little hook:

Off it is, without any damage or scratches. Phew.

Well, that was the easy part.  The mounting brackets were more complicated. Three on each side are only clipped in behind the rubber seal and come out easy.

The first and last one, however, are bolted in. and require removal of both the inner and outer rubber seal:

It went relatively smooth, though.

The complicated part was fitting all the three rubber pieces back together properly. It took me a good 30 minutes of pushing and wobbling around the rubber pieces to get them all in the correct order, position and straight.

The result is not bad though (picture does not show the final result). One of the main problem is that the visors brackets, which were installed on the car for years, deformed the rubber in that areas, so you can see the marks of the brackets. I hope the rubber goes back to original shape after a while. At the end, it’s only a small detail that probably no one will notice, but yeah. Details matter.

While working at it anyway, I decided to clean everything properly and give it some rubber care liquid:

It’s sad to see the car without the visors. They were a big part of its “JDM” identity, and I got the car with them from Japan originally. The car looks a bit sleeker now without the visors, but yeah, it was just a cool part of its history and style. And to be honest, they were quite practical when driving around. But that’s life and it had to be done.