Quick wing mirror question, E60 530d m Sport

[CS111]

Basically the other half broke the NS Wing mirror glass last night, Auto Dim
I called BMW today to check the price and fell of my chair when it was something like £300 all in just for the glass itself
I sourced another complete wing mirror as it seems impossible to just get the glass by itself for a reasonable price, The mirror unit is Silver my car is black
Can the silver back part of the mirror be removed and replaced by my black part and the glass removed and put into my mirror?

[chris116]

I had something similar on an E60 5 series I had. Someone clipped the wing mirror while it was parked and I found the actual mirror on the road with the housing pointed forward, I managed to return the housing to the correct position and put the mirror back in the housing after re-attaching the leads from the housing to the back of the mirror (for the heating elements?). All I did was line the mirror up with the housing and press it in and you could feel a click as it went home, the mirror moved around ok and heated up ok afterwards but the glass was pretty badly cracked. I found a tinted mirror glass in Halfords that was virtually the same and stuck it over the damaged glass and it was nearly as good as before. The car was leased so I returned it like that and didn't hear anything else. If your housing is ok and it's just the glass that is damaged I would have thought that it would be possible to pop the glass out of the mirror and replace it with the one from your new mirror? Its 5 or 6 years since that happened so hopefully I've remembered everything.

I had a couple of mirrors that this happened to as I thought the mirrors only folded back if you had the powered option which I didn't have. It was only when I mentioned this when I returned the 5 series that I found out that all of the mirrors could be folded back manually.