Lost Part

I always worry about some part coming loose on the car and falling off.  In particular, I had a hard time finding the headlight trim rings and they don't mount very securely.  So I debate whether it is better to have them wired on so they would stay on the car but damage the paint if they came loose or just have them fall off never to be found again.

Yesterday was the 13th Annual Italian Concours in Seattle.  The weather was for widely scattered showers and we were lucky almost to the end.

When I left, it was still raining, so I had the windshield wipers on.  Just as I was on the on-ramp to I-5, the passenger wiper arm and blade came off the car.  By the time I realized what had happened, the shoulder became non-existent and with lots of traffic, I wasn't able to pull off.

A big festival was going on at the Seattle Center and with the rain, I knew that the traffic would just get worse.  So I decided to wait until early this morning to try and find the wiper arm.  My wife and I drove back down and found a safe place to park a few hundred feet from where the wiper had fallen off.  I was in the right lane on a left bend, so I hoped that the arm would have slid off the side of the car onto the shoulder.  What luck, as I was walking up to the approximate area, I saw it just outside of the white line.

Nobody had run over it and it wasn't pristine to start so I didn't see any new damage.  Further, I couldn't find any marks on the paint where it hit the car when it came off.  If this had happened 30 seconds later, I would have been on I-5 changing lanes with no chance of recovering it intact.

Now I have to figure out why it doesn't stay on properly.

After looking at the mechanics, it's not clear to me that these are the original wiper arms for the car.  The depth of the knurled fitting on the wiper shaft (left picture) is more than the depth allowed in the wiper arm.  This prevents the spring clip (blue arrow) from locking under the fitting correctly.  The whole thing is rather sloppy but that could be almost 40 years of wear too.

I am trying three things.

1. I used a cut-off wheel on the Dremel to cut a shallower part of the fitting to make space for the clip.
2. I took out the spring clip and re-bent it so there would be more pressure.
3. I ground out the bottom of the hole in the arm (red arrow) so the arm would set down on the fitting more.

So the next time I have the car out of the shop, I'll put the hose on the windshield and run the wipers for several minutes and watch what happens.

Well, back to the drawing board.  The wiper arm came off in less time than it took to get the camera for a picture.

In preparation for the upcoming Canadian Tour where I expected some rain, I went to work on the problem again.  First I went over to a local auto parts store to see what generic arms were available.  I ended up buying both the small and large models in the correct length.  I wasn't sure which one would fit best over the fitting on my car.  It turns out that I needed both.  The small one fit quite tight on the fitting, but the end where the blade clips on was too narrow.  The large model had a wider end, so I moved it to the small arm.  Now I had an arm that I knew would work.

Since the problem was only on the passenger side, I installed the new arm there and left the driver's side alone.  As expected, it was raining when I left to meet the other folks for the drive up to Vancouver.  On the way to the meeting place, the driver's side decided to start slipping on the fitting, so it was wiping beyond the windshield edge.  I had to stop and re-align it, only to have it happen within a few miles.  At the meeting place, I elected to move the new arm to the driver's side and just leave off the passenger one.  After all, I didn't have a passenger and even if I did, they aren't driving so don't need to see anyway.

The only problem was that I got the arm installed too far down so it was trying to wipe on the body below the hood.  On this side, the arm fit so tight that I wasn't able to get it back off with the tools I had with me.  Using it as is would have scratched up the paint so I ended up driving through the rain until I could find a hardware store to buy a claw hammer and some wood shims.  A couple of shims went on top of a rag to protect the paint and the claw hammer was used to pry the arm off the fitting.  Then I put it on correctly and went the rest of the weekend with one wiper.

With another rainy drive in the offing, I re-visited the wiper arm situation.  The main problem is the fitting and hole in the wiper arm are worn and have too much play.  So I decided that some shimming might work.  A few wraps of heavy duty aluminum foil produced a tight fit.  The 10 minutes of testing with a hose keeping the windshield wet worked fine.  Then off to Portland.  The fix was working only the aluminum foil was allowing the fitting to slip inside the arm just slightly with each wipe.  So after 10 miles, the arm stopped wiping with the aluminum just letting it stay stationary at the bottom of the stroke.  At least it didn't come off or try to wipe the hood.  So I stopped and removed it.  I wish that I could just buy new OEM arms and be done with this problem.  I did have a passenger on this ride, but Stan said that he didn't need to see very well.

Since then, I did buy some OEM arms.  There was an eBay auction with some blades and arms along with some other 330 stuff.  Another 330 owner and I ended up bidding and splitting the auction items (and thank you TomS for not bidding).  I got the wiper parts and Rudy got the rest.

I had looked at the auction pictures and noticed that the arms did not have the little bend at the end that is designed to make the blades parallel to the bottom of the windshield when at rest.  I did some picture editing and decided that the overall lengths were right though.  Putting the bend in would be a simple matter with a little heat from a welding torch.  But when the arms arrived, they were about 3/4" shorter than I needed.  Obviously my size checking via pictures needs a little work.

The arm base was the same length, only the riveted and clamped in arm extension was incorrect.  I decided to solve both the length and bend problems at the same time by replacing the extensions with the ones from my old arms.  As you can see, there is a rivet holding the extension to the base in addiction to the base being crimped around the extension.

The rivet is solid stainless steel that is peened over on the underside.  To remove this, I decided to grind away the peened over portion using a couple of diamond coated bits in my Dremel.  This took about 15 minutes per rivet.  Then I drove the rivet out the top, un-crimped the extension and the two pieces were apart.

Re-assembly was straight forward since there was enough length on the rivets to peen them over to hold everything together.  Before I did that, I took the opportunity to polish all of the parts using the buffing wheel.  Here are the arms all together ready to go back on the car.

Of course, the penultimate test was to run them for several minutes on the car (click here to see a short video)  with water from a hose running on the windshield.  Here's how everything looks, all polished up and done.

The final test will be tomorrow on a FCA drive and this being Seattle in the spring, rain is expected.  I did keep the store bought arm in the car just in case!

PS, it didn't rain the next day.