Installing the wipers

I started working on the wipers a while ago, then left them alone for a while as more important (more important at the time anyway) things came up.

I started with four wiper motors, in varying states of disrepair. Suffice to say that none of them worked when 12v was applied to them.

I then decided to have ago at refurbishment, using http://vivalaant.wordpress.com/2007/01/24/series-rover-lucas-wiper-motor-refurbishment/ as my guide.

Out of the four motors, I managed to get two going. I have to say it was one of the fiddliest, most pernickety jobs I have ever undertaken.

Just getting the 50 year old, solidified grease out of them was a major task in itself.

I won’t even mention the teensy little wires supplying the field coils which had to be de-soldered for disassembly, nor the smallest spring in the world holding the brushes in.

Anyway, I got two of the motors to spin by judicious disassembly and reassembly. One of them seemed ok after testing, but the other only turned very slowly.

I decided to send the slow motor off to Kevin Baker (KB Classic Parts, 07 5494 4221) see http://www.hinterlandtimes.com.au/2009/03/05/kevin-baker-a-man-of-many-parts/ for his story.

Kevin and his auto-electrician rebuilt the motor, put in a new armature and brushes, and when it came back it was working beautifully.

I then mounted the wipers in the windscreen, and fitted the wiper blades. I used blades off a Series 3, and had to cut them down a bit.

When I tried the motors with the new blades, the recently refurbished wiper got stuck (the blade was a bit long) and promptly stopped working.

I gave a deep sigh, pulled the wiper off, and took it down to the shed. No big problems, the armature wasn’t spinning inside the field coils.

For those of you who haven’t had a look inside the motor, the armature spins inside a pair of arms. There’s about a 0.1 mm gap around the armature, which you adjust by hand then fix by tightening two nuts. When you tighten the nuts, the field coils move about 0.1 mm, the armature sticks, and you start again.

Having finally got that solved, the motor turned ok, but the wiper made nasty clunking noises and the shaft didn’t turn any more.

So I took the gearbox side of the motor off, and had a look. It turned out one of the fibre gear wheels had a couple of teeth stripped off it. So I ratted through the wiper junk box, found a new gear and put that on. Success!

My best guess is that when the blade stuck the metal worm turning the fibre stripped the teeth off the fibre gear, and shifted the armature a bit as well. Wonderful design, don’t you just love Joe Lucas, Prince of Darkness.

Anyway, a couple of photos.