Wiper arm hack
I'm not trying to redirect this thread, but this is about the rear wiper.
Since I now have a spare rear wiper arm, I felt free to hack it so that it is now able to stay in the raised position (off the window). Many of you who live where the white stuff falls from the sky and the air hurts your face know why this is important. If you need to know why someone would want to do this - you don't need to do this.
I'm not good at "how-to" posts, but the basics are pretty simple if you have a small grinder (like a Dremel rotary tool). One other caveat: I'm not responsible for your hack jobs - just my own.
1) Get the arm off the vehicle and the blade off the arm.
2) Separate the arm at the pivot. Don't try to pull the spring out first. Just grab each half of the arm in either hand and pull straight apart. The spring will yield enough to let you clear the two small tabs that prevent the pivot from over traveling. So you only need to pull the arm apart about 1/4 inch and then you can fold it over to relieve the spring tension. The tension of the spring is the only thing that keeps the pivot joint together. The spring can then be easily removed.
3) Now that you have the spring out of the way, put the pivot back together and you'll see that there are a few places where material needs to be removed to allow the arm to pivot up further. I just ground the offending material away with small grinder. Once that material is gone, the arm (without the spring) will be able to pivot > 60 degrees.
4) That's only half the battle. Now the arm can pivot far enough, but the spring will not allow it - or hold it in the raised position. If you put it back together with the spring you'll see what I mean. There's a little bit of physics going on here that we need to re-engineer.
5) The trick to getting the arm to stay up is that the spring pivot points (where the spring attaches) need to move to the other side of the arm pivot point. To accomplish this, you need to remove material that the straight part of the spring runs into - as the arm is lifted.
Basically you need to remove all the material in the center thin part of the arm - in the area of where the pivot joint is. I even dimpled the center of the pivot shaft - to allow another millimeter or two of clearance. It took a bit of trial and error to get enough material removed (in the right spots). Nothing I did is visible when the arm is reassembled.
6) Once you start reworking it, you'll understand the goal. It does not appear to me that removing the necessary material compromised the strength of the arm in any meaningful way. Once the spring has enough clearance to allow the arm to pivot far enough, the arm will stay in the raised position due to spring tension. Moving the arm back down, beyond the magic balance point, will allow the spring to force the blade against the window again.
This is the first vehicle I've owned with a rear wiper (and I've had quite a few) that didn't allow the blade to be positioned off the glass. Now this one works just as all the others have.
