Last week, My youngest daughter and I were drving in the LC. She was fiddling with the sunshade, and when she tried to move the sunshade away from the secondary shade beneath it, the sunshade popped off the ceiling and the screws flew through the cabin. We were both surprised at how easy the sunshade came off of the ceiling! She carefully put it down on the back seat, and we went about our business. The following describes what I discovered later, and why I am looking for someone parting out an LC 100 with grey interior.

Powering the Sunshade: I need the harness

Later, I found the screw and I took a closer look at the sunshade. There were two wires passing through the foot that fastened to the ceiling. They brought power to the make-up light next to the sunshade’s small mirror. I poked my fingers around inside the hole in the ceiling and found a white plastic (female) harness. Clearly, this was meant for the sunshade, but there was no male harness part on the subshade side of the circuit! Somehow, the loose wires had fit into the harness and drew power to the mirror light, but it wasn’t clear to me how that worked.

Sunshade is missing the male end of the power harness.

To figure out how the power should be connected, I went to the driver-side sunshade and removed it. Sure enough, it had a complete harness.

The power harness on the driver-side sunshade.

The shape of the power harness on the driver-side sunshade.

I brought the drive-side sunshade to the local NAPA Autoparts store, and the guy at the counter shook his head and said to find a harness like that I’d have to go to a junkyard. I did. I did not find one.

Fixing the sunshade: I need the sunshade

It appeared that the passenger-side sunshade had been connected to the ceiling with one screw. I noticed when taking apart the driver-side sunshade that it, too, was connected to the ceiling with only one screw. Curious. So I went to Home Depot to get some replacement screws. They were 5mm in diameter, and the screw I took from the ceiling was shorted than the screws Home Depot had available. I tried them anyway, and they worked fine when I reattached the driver-side sunshade.

I noticed something when I was reattaching. The shape of the ‘foot’ on the sunshade (the part that the screws pass through to connect the sunshade to the ceiling) was a different shape than the foot on the passenger-side sunshade. Take a look.

Foot on driver-side sunshade.

First view of foot on passenger-side sunshade.

Second view of foot on passenger-side sunshade, showing the structure of the foot’s backside.

Notice that the foot on the driver-side sunshade is triangular. The foot on the passenger-side sunshade is oval. When I tried to reattach the passenger-side sunshade to the ceiling, the structures on the foot’s backside (see above) did not align with the structure of the holes in the ceiling, which is distinctly triangular. I could fasten the sunshade to the ceiling with one screw, but I couldn’t get a second screw in. That explained the fragility of the sunshade and why it came away from the ceiling!

Wanted: harness and sunshade

To fix this problem, It looks like I need a proper sunscreen for the passenger-side. If I’m lucky, it will come with the proper harness, too!