Wipers

So I’ve invested a ridiculous amount of time into getting the windshield wipers sorted. It seems like a silly thing to put that much work into on a car which doesn’t even have a roof. If I get caught in the rain, the wipers may not be at the top of my worry list.

The first issue is that a bunch of pieces were missing in the kit. That wasn’t too big a deal because the wiper system it uses is the one that was used in several popular cars such as the Mini and the MG-B. The good news is that it’s pretty easy to find parts for it in this country. The bad news, of course, is that it was made by Lucas.

So I managed to gather all of the parts, cut them down to fit the narrower car, and get the motor wired up and running correctly (you should read the part about getting them to park correctly), but recently I had to start installing the trim around the windshield. The shafts for the wipers come up from under the scuttle, pass through a rubber piece, though a fiberglass trim piece, and then are sealed with a funny looking nut. Here’s what the rubber piece in the middle looks like:

Well, it turns out that doesn’t fit at all. It’s too long, so the trim has a big gap under it and the pointy part interferes with the windshield. Luckily, working at Formlabs, I don’t need to let a little problem like that get in my way. I just designed a better piece. Here’s what it looked like when it came out of the printer.

After cutting off all of those little supports, I was left with this:

In addition to fitting better than the original, the extra width of this one means that it doesn’t try to spin around when I tighten the nut down. It stays in place because the back presses up against the windshield.

Once I got two of those installed, the trim piece fit on much better:

So, it was probably way more work than it was worth, but it turned out pretty well in the end.