Parts Matching

The Astro's driver-side sun visor broke some time ago, and while Lisa improvised something that helps quite a while ago, and we've been living with it, I've kept meaning to track down a replacement. On Sunday morning, I drove in to Pick-N-Pull in Sparks and found a similar Astro to mine with what I thought was a similar sun screen, which I removed. Cost about $10 plus $2 admission to the yard. Today, Lisa tried to install it. We discovered that apparently Chevrolet made a small modification to the mount, and the three holes that hold the shade that I got are just slightly closer together than they are on my 1989.

The good news is that I can return this part for part credit, and there are other Chevy Astros and GMC Safaris in their yard. Maybe we can find one that's older and has the correct mounting bracket to fit on my van. The bad news is that hiking around a junkyard in this heat is No Fun.

Lisa put the old bracket with the temporary fix back in place. It helps. I felt better when she told me that she would have made exactly the same mistake I did, because the mounts both look the same until you hold them right up against each other.