Windshield Wipers

When we towed the car back from PA I removed the wiper arms to avoid any damage.  They have been riding around in the trunk ever since.  It is not like I will ever drive the thing in the rain anyway.  But it does look a little funny so I will put them on soon.

The wipers are driven by two vacuum motors.  The motors use intake vacuum from the engine to run the wipers.  They sort of work but are pretty weak.   Usually this just means the leather or felt seals inside the motor are dried out.  Pumping some light oil though the motor should fix it.  But I will have to remove the motors and that means ripping the glove box out and rooting around a dash filled with 60 year old wire.  I will wait until I have some other reason to go in there.

But the knob I can do now.  The old knob was broken so 20 years ago my dad replaced it with some plastic Radio Shack knob.  I was browsing Stephen Allen Studebaker when I saw they had the correct part for $15.  OK, you talked me into it. I was ordering some rubber parts anyway and the wiper controls are a straight shot up under the dash.

First step is to remove the old knob.  The plastic knob came off with a set screw.  Everything else is done from under the dash.  This picture is very fuzzy (sorry!) but you can see there are two arms that connect the knob to the vacuum motor control valves.  The bellcrank for these arms a two-piece part held together by the two screws you can see on the bellcrank arm.  This allows the angle of the arm to be adjusted to "balance" the wiper speeds of the two vacuum motors.  To remove the knob I removed these two screws and the large nut around the barrel of the knob.  I then installed the new knob and fumbled around on my back under the dash until I got all the parts back in place.  The new knob looks much more authentic.  There are some bubbles in the paint around the knob that were hidden by the plastic knob but there is not much I can do about that.  Maybe I can find a chrome washer to cover it up.