Rear Wiper confusion

[DiscoPol]

Hi guys,

my rear wiper motor gave up the ghost a while back so gave it a good coat of looking at with the multimeter to check i was getting voltage and a bloody good spray of WD40 down the shaft and with a little gently persuasion and some hefty twists it sprang back to live......for about 3 days

now that was a couple of months ago and i never got round to sorting it as we were in the process of moving out to Poland and other things just seemed to get in the way, so i have lived with it not working for the last two or three months but as the weather improves out here and the sun is now shining almost every day the rear screen is forming condensation on the outside over night then as i drive it collects all the dust from the awful roads so consequential i cant see a bloody thing out the back window most of the time, now in the UK this wouldnt really bother me but here you need eyes in your ar$e let alone the back of your head so decided today was the day to get it sorted as the weather was a pleasant 24 degrees C and i had no real work to do

So i took the old one out and decided to strip it right down and see if it was the motor or gears that had given up the ghost, it was an fiddly little thing but time costs nothing and sitting in the sun doing it is so much better than sitting on the drive in pi$$ing rain, got it stripped down and cleaned up in next to no time slipped back the worm drive and plugged it back into the car and switched on the rear wiper stalk and the motor turned a treat, so its not the motor then

Now I remember Steve telling me his had gone down with a seized shaft so that was my next target i removed the outer sleeve around the shaft and low and behold there was the culprit a solid mass of crud caused by, my guess would be galvanic corrosion or maybe just the shaft not being suitable lubed where it passes through the glanding into the gearbox housing, either way it was well and truly FUBAR and not for shifting, so i gave it a serious dosing of penetrating oil and left it for a good while.

3 coffees and a couple of bits of cake later (inlaws garden being used as repair bay as that way i get a baby sitter thrown in for free as well as the coffee and cakes ) and i decide to try and free it for a good 20 minutes in the vice with mole grips,pipe grips, dogs and any other likely looking grippy tool lying about and failing miserably so i started a gentle "percussive shock treatment", nothing, stepped up the "percussive shock treatment"(yes that's hitting it with a bloody big hammer) to a higher level, nothing.
Stepped up the treatment one more level....................
and smashed the thing to pieces
Decided to continue smashing the housing apart so i could see just how far along the shaft the corrosion was,
well it was the full length of the contact area between the shaft (steel) and the housing (aluminium)
that one will never work again but it gave me a great feeling of satisfaction

Now there is a scrappy just down the road specializing in pugs,shitrons and ren-NO's so of i toddle with the Mrs as translator, get down there and find at least two of the guys speak fairly good English anyway, we pull a motor assembly off a tidy looking RHD 406 2001 exec i think by the look of the interior, and take it out to my motor plug in and nothing so i reckon this one is screwed too, quick check with multimeter to confirm i have voltage at the plugs and all is well there, so he goes away to find me another, there is no shortage of 406s in there to pull from
5 mins later he turns up with another assembly we stick that one on and i go and twist the stalk to start wiping and .....nothing

we take this one into their workshop pop it on the bench and stick 12v up its harris with 2 wires from an old battery and it wipes perfectly so anybody got any ideas why if i have voltage at the plug and my old one turned fine with the gears disconnected why i the replacements wouldn't work??

Im well and truly confused,
but it did start what looks like being a "beautiful" friendship with the local english speaking scrappy at least

Post script just previewed the post and realise its a long one sorry chaps but this polish telly is boring as hell

[steve_earwig]

and smashed the thing to pieces

I've no idea, I just laughed when I got to that bit

(I think I pushed mine through into a socket in the vice)

You jammy goit, there's on Pug breakers in the whole country here, right up the end next to thecountrythatdoesn'tappearonroadsigns

Service box says there's one for D8 estates and one for D9s (the D9's doesn't have a relay on it), so I've not got a clue why the one from the 2001 didn't work. Can you not use the housing from the new with the internals of yours?

[DiscoPol]

Not now

[Welly]

That's a great post and a nice little story; I was 'there with you'

When you normally call for a 'wipe' does this do you a single wipe, a continous or enables intermittant until you stop it again?

I don't know why I asked that because whatever you answer I still won't know further

Rear wipers are weird, her indoors went to wipe the rear wiper on her Ashtray (which was frozen to the screen ) and I thought it would be goosed, but no, on freeing it up it just carried on regardless

A lot of motors have built-in electronics and park/stop switches inside but I just don't know what to say about yours

[DiscoPol]

That's a great post and a nice little story; I was 'there with you'

thanks for the positive words Welly, Im a little bored at night these days so in danger of rambling on a tad too much in my posts, if this happens tho im sure you guys with the "edit" ability will sort me out

as for the questions you asked I will provide the superfluous answers you dont really need

upon calling for some rear wiping action I get an intermittent wipe until i cancel on the stalk, unless i have chosen to apply screenwash first then i get a sequence of 5 or maybe 6 continuous wipes and then it returns to intermittent again.

think im just going to tape up the hole in my rear screen and apply a boat load of Rainex to the glass, all that is then required is a judicious use of the hose pipe each time it gets so filthy i cant see, after all what are wing-mirrors for


looking at flogging the 406 for a trade up to a P38 Range Rover anyway

[Welly]

You can ramble on as much as you wish, in fact many are guilty of giving too little information and can't be helped easily as a result.

I had the rear wiper on a BMW Compact go like this. The screen wash jet was part-and-parcel of the wiper arm/spindle - great idea except it leaks down the shaft and into the motor. I spent ages cleaning, greasing and cursing and still never got it sorted. In the end I 'parked' the wiper arm where it should and left it be luckily enough the new buyers forgot to check it. Oh and they forgot to try the passenger window which I had 'fixed' after Mrs Welly went to lower it whilst being frozen solid (been here before haven't we?)

Are the roads that bad that you can't really use 'normal' cars?

[sirwiggum]

Now there is a scrappy just down the road specializing in pugs,shitrons and ren-NO's :

Now now! Citroens are just rebodied Peugeots with or without spheres!

[DiscoPol]

The 2 main motorway type roads through the country are the A2 (west to east) and the A1 (north to south) and even they would give a "Western" motorist palpitations, they are being improved all the time in preparation for the 2012 European Cup or World Cup or whatever sports related thing it is (can you tell im not a footy fan??)they are hosting here in Poland and in the Ukraine,

But they are fighting sub standard materials, corrupt businesses, huge penalty clauses if they are late to complete, and winters that are consistently in the -20 to -30 region so not much hope of them sorting the major routes in the next generation or so, it will be cosmetically sorted for the 2012 thingy, but come winter it will all break up again and they will continue to patch it with what is effectively, those bags of tarmac like stuff you can get in B&Q back in the uk for your garden paths and the constant rumble of trucks (44 tonne here not 40 tonne like the uk) and summer road surface temps of 50 degrees + equals ruts you can seriously fall into (6" +) and need a ladder to climb out of and all this in on the major routes.

Now i live about 30 km outside Warsaw so not in the rural heartland by any standard and the roads here are shocking once off the aforementioned "major" roads more patches than road surface pot holes of 6 inches depth are very common and you wont travel more than 10 feet without a hole or patch of some type in the road.

Add to all this that dirt roads are not uncommon for residential properties off normal roads, and some of my private students live down such roads can you see why im thinking of changing the 406 for a 4x4? in winter they dont do gritting on anything other than the arterial routes and the snow is compacted down on to the road surface by the traffic, you do have to by law change to winter tyres on a certain date each year which kind of helps with the snow covered roads but I used to have a Rangey a while back and cant think of a better vehicle to deal with the road conditions summer and winter than that, fuel not withstanding it will work out as a safer, better , more capable vehicle in long run.

Not looking at changing till after summer and probably will flog the 406 out here as prices are much higher even for RHD cars than the uk, like about 3.5 time the cost to buy than in the uk

The rangey will be another RHD i will buy, insure, tax and test in the uk and bring out, thank god for free movement within europe eh? no importation costs as im only visiting you see

but all this is months off and only my master plan at the moment, if there was a way of "butching up" the pugs suspension i would probably stick with it as the fuel cost and comfort are fantastic but it wouldnt help me come winter time, so sadly it will have to go one day

[Welly]

I think you're right about a rangey having seen that Top Gear episode where Jezza took one to Bolivia and La Paz.

It soaked up the massive holes and lumps easy, but then it would knowing the mahoosive sussy travel of rangey's.

You could always get a, a, a, Diesel version......there I said it.

[omega]

off topic
surely you just need to buy a 4 wheel drive 405 take it and the 406 to one of the garages over there come back a week later and one 406 4x4

[DiscoPol]

Welly!! no swearing!!

not worth it really mate, only get about 28 mpg combined if you drive like a nun, and a 4l or 4.6l converted to gas will give me the equivalent of 40 + mpg on petrol, so add to that the sound of a V8 and the poke to make the runs back through Germany fun again, its a no brainer i reckon

[DiscoPol]

off topic
surely you just need to buy a 4 wheel drive 405 take it and the 406 to one of the garages over there come back a week later and one 406 4x4

Nice idea, but the cost of buying anything here would make it a non starter, if you could find a 4x4 405 here you would be looking at paying about 4000 PLN (polish zloty) for a very old and tatty one then garage bills could be anything upto another 2000 pln, then you would have to re-register the car here so requiring a steering side swap another 3000 pln and finally the translation of your original docs into polish for the swap over another 400 pln giving you about 9400 pln (can you tell i have looked into this )

where as i could by a '96-'99 P38 rangey in the uk for less than 2k chug over land to here and have a gas kit fitted for about £750 total price £3000, total price for the conversion at today exchange rate is a tad under this but throw into the mix i can flog my 406 for anything up to 7000 pln and it all becomes a much better idea to buy the rangey, a car i have had before and know well, plus its like a big tonka toy and easy enough to work on, all except that bloody suspension but that could easily be swapped out for coil springs.

[sirwiggum]

Get yourself a 4x4 Xantia

http://koti.mbnet.fi/css/xantia/xantiacomp.html

Shares the floorplan with the 406, making transferring the bodywork to the chassis slightly easier

[DiscoPol]

not one of my pics, but not unrealistic for a local post winter road by any stretch of the imagination

[teamster1975]

Nice and smooth then!
Flipping norra, I thought the roads around Woking were bad, sod riding a motorbike out near your neck of the woods in the dark!!!!