Hurricane Irene was dumping massive water on us on Saturday morning and the wind predictions were too close to call as far as how safe we were in the present location behind the house.
Old standing trees tend to hold a lot of water and it does not take much wind to start bringing parts of them down so we decided to move the rig to an open parking lot nearby with some buildings to shield us from the worst of the winds and with no trees to fall or drop parts on us.
Just as I was pulling the whole rig out of the driveway in the rain to relocate it the wipers stopped, pointing skyward and a raucous stripped gear sound erupted from the firewall.
Yep, wiper motor stripped its gears and no wipers. In this limited condition I settled on just getting it a few blocks to a different open parking lot and leaving it there until the wind threat was over.
Unfortunately, it was Saturday and no Truck dealers were open that might carry the part so repair had to wait until Monday morning.
On Sunday, in nice weather, Emery, III jumped in to help me get the old motor out and on Monday, helped install the new one.
On my 2000 Volvo 770, we just had to take off the nut on the drive shaft that holds the wiper arm link to the splined wiper motor shaft and then drive the arm off of that shaft.
Once the arm was clear of the wiper motor drive shaft, It was just a matter of removing 3 short 10mm bolts that held the motor to the bracket. The new motor came with new mounting bolts and a new self locking nut to hold the wiper arm link onto the wiper motor drive shaft.
The hardest part about R/R this wiper motor was getting my 300 lbs into the right position with the right bracing to loosen and tighten the 3 bolts and the retaining drive shaft nut. The rest was easy.
The replacement motor is a Sprague and came with a pigtail to plug in the wiper control electrical cable. The original motor had the electrical socket mounted directly to the motor assembly. No big deal.
With the right tools (10 mm open end, 10 mm socket, 1/2” open end wrench and a medium shaft Phillips screwdriver to stick into the hole in the bracket to block the wiper connecting rod from rotating while removing / replacing the nut that held it onto the drive shaft, it would be a 15 minute job to R/R once you had the replacement motor in hand.
ttfn
Budd
