Working on a mirror repair

On our trip from Dallas down to Willis last week (I was driving), I noticed (1) some "bangs" every once in a while that I hadn't noticed before and (2) the driver's side mirror on Gracie was vibrating a lot. While driving, I asked Carl to look at the two mirrors (driver side and passenger side) to see if he also thought that it was vibrating a lot. He agreed that it looked like it was vibrating and suggested that we get off to check it. We were in a more rural part of Texas so I got off on the frontage road and was able to just stop on the frontage road (two lanes both going the same way with no traffic) while Carl got out to check on it. He found that the support for the mirror was loose, and that there did not seem to be any easy way to correct it along the side of the road. We decided to drive more slowly, hope for less wind, and pray that we'd make it to the campground safely and without losing the mirror.

At the campground... it is a large heavy mirror attached to the front/side of the motorhome.

When we had stopped to see what the problem was on the road, to curb the wobble, Carl wadded up a paper towel and wedged it under the side that was loose so it wouldn't put more pressure on the screws on the other side -- aka redneck repair.

Carl couldn't see any easy way to get to the components that attach the mirror to the side of the coach. I looked up information on irv2.com and found some other folks with Newmar motorhomes who had had a loose mirror and how they dealt with it -- there weren't any with a Dutch Star, but they gave some clues as to how to get into the mirror attachment (https://www.irv2.com/forums/f103/ventana-le-loose-mirror-base-242546.html, https://www.irv2.com/forums/f103/loose-passenger-side-rear-view-mirror-347035.html, https://www.irv2.com/forums/f103/replacing-a-mirror-250754.html, https://www.irv2.com/forums/f103/passenger-side-mirror-shaking-347041.html).

With that information, Carl was able to remove the mirror and down to the part that attaches it to the rig...

Unfortunately, the screws in the back weren't "holding" anymore.

From the outside, we couldn't see what the screws were going into on the inside...

... so Carl opened up the hatch that allows access to the generator -- it is hard to see in the picture, but there are wires that are going into spray-on foam insulation which is covering the area where the screws were coming through from the outside. We couldn't tell whether the screws were held in with a piece of metal or wood or if they were just through the fiberglass...

... but it turned out that we could see one screw -- the bottom screw of the front two screws that was still holding...

... and it was just through the fiberglass... very disappointed with this cheap construction on a motorhome that touts the quality of their building processes.

Nothing to do but to try digging through the sprayed-in foam (red arrow pointing to the bottom of the two front screws that we had seen -- digging on the other side for the connection points of the two back screws)...

After quite a bit of excavation, Carl exposed the bottom hole of the two back screws (two arrows on right are pointing to the two screws at the front, left arrow pointing at the hole found for the back bottom screw).

I did a little more scraping and then I poked through from the outside while Carl cleared on the inside for the top back screw hole.

Our plan now is to get stainless steel bolts with washers and nuts to replace the screws.