Continued today with the refurbishment of my wiper motor and linkages.
I managed to source the missing spring as I said above and it transpired that the plastic slider I thought should be inside was part of the 'Park' mechanism from an earlier model. So as I wasn't waiting for an internal component I set about rebuilding the complete wiper motor after giving the motor case a few coats of satin black.
Everything went back together with ease and I packed out the internals with plenty of grease. Once that was finished I moved onto stripping and refurbishing the vacum delay governor.
Finished wiper mechanism. Not much to look at but far cleaner than when it came out.
While I had the motor out I thought it best to remove the wheel boxes and tubes. I cleaned out all the old grease and reassembled them. One thing to bear in mind when putting the back plates back on the wheel boxes is not to overtighten the nuts as this 'clamps' the gear wheels and causes them to bind, they are then harder to turn. loosening them a bit allows the wheels to spin. I think this may have contributed to the slow speed of the wipers.
Since owning the car my delay setting has never worked and when selected the wipers operated constantly. I had read a lot about the infamous bit of sponge being the usual cause for the lack of delay. I took quite a few pictures for those of you that have yet to dismantle this unit so hopefully this will help. To be honest its an incredibly simple bit of kit.
Very dirty and covered in loads of overspray from a previous respray :roll:
The actual unit is simply split by removing the four clips. I was aware of the large spring inside and was carful to hold the two halves together but I found that the hakves were tight and had to be prised apart anyway.
Next I removed the diaphragm from the housing. Simply pull off the plastic cap on the end of the piston and withdraw the diaphragm.
You can now see once the diaphragm is removed the contacts.
Once all that was clean I moved onto the other half that contains the sponge. All you need to do is pick out the metal retaining plate and under that should be a bit of sponge then a rubber membrane. There were remnants of the sponge but it had basically disintergrated.
The plate, membrane and case minus the sponge
I had read a few threads about the type of sponge to use, so I elected to use a bit of my brand new car sponge from Halfords. I cut a cube roughly by eye to fill the hole and you can see the rubber membrane in place before I added the sponge and held it all down with the metal plate.
Once it was all clean I reassembled the unit. Here you can just make out the yellow sponge in the top.
All finished and ready to fit to the car
One problem that I had was that two of the rubber mounts for the whole mechanism were damaged and one had been replaced with a bolt and some fuel hose. I decided to remove the only good one and replace all three with my own improvised mounts consisting of bolts and fuel pipe. I think they turned out really well and hold the motor securely.
All fitted and ready for test. The bottom picture clearly shows the spring that was missing. I did run the wipers without it and even though the plastic slide returned to the bottom the spring does speed that process up considerably.
Anyway as far as testing the wipers on both normal and fast no longer juddered and were alot quicker even on a dry screen. the big test was the delay. Had I fixed it...... The answer was YES
Turning the white knob by the steering wheel gave me full control of the delay. Now ehn its spitting I wont have to keep reaching to flick the wipers on and off.
One thing I've noticed is having removed the wheel boxes and refitting them my wipers are now sitting slightly lower thereby not fouling on the bonnet when I lift it. Obviously someone in the past hadn't fitted them properly. They are held in with rubber mounts so I made sure everything was straight and tight when it went in.
All in all a couple of days work, taking my time and what a massive difference it has made. Well worth doing if your wipers are slow or more importantly if the delay is kaput.
