Windshield Wipers-- You Wear Diapers-!!!

Back from a week away, dog sitting for my sis...and wouldn't you know the day we had to drive back home it poured rain!!  AND then my drivers windshield wiper spazZzed out on me! It literally flew off to the far left and was hitting the side view mirror and got stuck!! I stopped, got soaked, tried to put it back in place went another mile and it did it again!! WTF? Okay that confirms it~Everything does NOT happen for a reason...holy-cow.

So I did what any red blooded American woman would do....I improvised! It's Sunday afternoon in the Deep South, there was not a chance in Hell Fire and Brimestone of me finding a garage open...may as well have driven into Mayberry RFD. So I stopped at a Citgo where 2 men from Pakistan, with big smiles and smart phones  looked at me as if I had fallen outta the sky with the rain...I went to the shelf and bought a bottle of Rain-X, best damned stuff ever invented.( buy some of this and keep it IN your car)  I pulled under the gas pump area out of the rain, dried the window off, squirted a copious amount of the fluid on the window, smeared it all over with a paper towel and let it dry to a haze then buffed it off...

Worked like a charm... as long as you're moving, and on the I-26 everyone was going 80! I went 65 and the wind blew the pelting rain right off the windshield. I couldn't use the wipers at ALL! My Mom thought I was crazy, but when she saw the water gliding off the windshield with NO wipers she was amazed!!  So 2 hrs driving in a blinding rain storm with no wipers can we say White Knuckles?? My newly formed wrist bones were aching and still are...

But anyways you know me, this morning I watched a you tube on how to repair the wiper, this guy said that the wiper has a thin sheet of aluminum lining on the wiper arm where it attaches to the car, and it gets corroded, so start by removing the plastic cover at the end of the wiper, this photo is the other one, cause I forgot to take a photo of the drivers side one before I removed it, 

under that plastic cover is a 13mm nut, remove that and then the wiper arm comes right off...tilt it up like you do when you clean the windshield and then lift it off the "drive spine"

 See all the corrosion? the little grooves have to be cleaned out so I scraped them out using a utility blade and a wire brush...then I sprayed it with W-D40 to knock the green corrosion off...

Here it is after cleaning it....

Reattach the arm keeping it level with the other arm, and replace the nut and tighten...I tapped the arm back on with a hammer to set it good down in that aluminum...

Then snap the plastic cover back on....

Give it a try....

Looks good now, before it was going way over past the side mirror! The guy said its caused when you clean snow off your wipers and you bang them too hard....GUILTY AS CHARGED on that one!

PEACE

Eleanor Roosevelt: You must do the thing you think you can not.