Well, I found another interesting characteristic of old Jeep Trucks, Sedan Deliveries and Station Wagons this weekend. We were at a parade on Saturday and as luck would have it, it started to rain. It wasn’t very raining very hard, the kids ran under trees or sat under umbrellas, but out in the street we got wet.

I started the wipers, (vacuum of course), and got a good slow flip-flap rhythm set up. Then, after about five minutes, “CLACK-FLUMP” the passenger side wiper departed the knurled pivot. No big deal, just stop and retrieve the wiper and arm, get a little wet and get on with throwing Tootsie Rolls to the kids. After all, my wife didn’t need to see how to drive out her side.

After I got home and dried off a bit, I went out to the truck barn to look at things. After poking and peeking a bit, I see the problem, but I don’t have a solution as yet. On the driver’s side, the wiper swings clockwise through about a 110-degree arc. It stops at the bottom of the windshield molding and then just short of the windshield center post. But, on the passenger’s side, the counterclockwise arc is more like 115 degrees - a wider arc anyway. Every time the passenger wiper flip-flaps, it hits the center post with a pretty good whack. If I back it off the center post, it whacks the molding at the bottom.

This in turn dislodges the wiper arm from the knurled post and actually wears the knurls off. If you look on page 285 of this year’s KWAS catalog, you see a diagram of that wiper setup. Each wiper has a stainless steel braided cable that winds around a set of pulleys and then another set of pulleys in the actual pivot assembly. Rigging those cables looks a lot like rigging aileron or elevator control cables in an airplane, except there are no turnbuckles for length adjustment. And, oh by the way, those idler pulleys where the cables turn the corner have some REALLY BIG springs to tension them. Oh well, another trip up under the dash…