What I came up with to make the wipers land correctly.

[John Buchtenkirch]

When I got my coupe the wipers landed a quarter of the way up the windshield which just looked goofy to me. After inspecting it I noticed the crank arm on the wiper motor stopped at the 3 o’clock position instead of parallel with the drive linkage which is somewhere between 1 & 2 o’clock. It just required unbolting the crank arm from the splined shaft and reattaching it while correctly lined up.

Getting rid of the slop in the wiper arms was more difficult because only the left side is still available. I bought a second new left arm and used part of the original right to make what is in effect a new right arm with tight pivots. As you can see in the photo if I had used 2 left arms the angle of the right blade would have been off. I spun a small screw of the correct diameter in a lathe and shaped the head with file till it looked like a correct rivet. I used a piece of lead to back up the head and peened over the other end with a hammer. After it was back together I blasted it with aluminum oxide and painted it with Krylon high heat black which is an appropriate semi gloss finish.

Kind of a lot of effort & money spent on a car that may never see the rain but at least it doesn’t hurt my eyes to look at it now. I also kind of toned down the position of the front plate just to clean up the look of the front of the car. Eventually I may add a wider rubber strip to the center of the bumper, I’m not real happy with what I did there. ~ John Buchtenkirch

 

[rsporsche]

John,

maybe i'm misunderstanding something. couldn't you have just pulled the wiper arm off and realigned it? or was it just the slop in the mechanism that it stopped short

 

[John Buchtenkirch]

John,

maybe i'm misunderstanding something. couldn't you have just pulled the wiper arm off and realigned it? or was it just the slop in the mechanism that it stopped short

On my coupe the problem was a combination of slop in the arms that hold the blades and the drive crank was in the wrong orientation on the drive motor. Because of the wrong position of the crank the blades would sweep down to where they were supposed to stop and then sweep up a bit. When the motor stops the crank arm should be lined up with the linkage as shown in my photo. It’s not a big deal, someone previously just installed it wrong. Many times people have a wiper arm or both installed one spline off but that wasn’t the problem in my case --- well at least this time.

I also twisted one of the arms as shown in the photo below to square up the blade to the glass, something that many people overlook. Ideally the blades should be square to the glass so they can flip easily when they change direction. ~ John Buchtenkirch