Running nicely, so what’s next?

Now that (almost) everything in the engine bay has been cleaned up, reassembled, and in working order I’ve got to choose what’s next on the list of things to do, so I’ve decided to turn my attention to the windshield wipers. When I turn them on they only seem to function in “fast” mode. The “slow” and “intermittent” modes resulted in nothing at all. The motor obviously works to some extent, but not well enough. I uncoupled the motor from the mechanical parts of the wiper mechanism and turned it on. The results were not encouraging (see video below). So before buying a new one, which is a lot more expensive than I imagined given that we’re just talking about a simple DC electric motor, I resolved to try and rebuild the motor.

After disassembly everything looked pretty good in terms of physical condition. Nothing obviously broken or unusable. The switches that I assume tell the wiper relay the current position of the motor were not properly aligned which probably explains why the intermittent function wasn’t working, and the brushes did look worn. Those are easy to replace. I ordered a new set and, when they eventually show up, will replace them and put some new grease in. Hopefully this will improve the strength of the motor and also quiet it down.

Click the read more link to hear a nice, smooth cold restart of the engine along with the horrible sound of the wiper motor.