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The wipers
The night I picked up the car, the
boyfriend told me that the wipers weren't working. That turned out
to be the understatement of the year.
In January, in New York, wipers are something that you can't
really do without. Besides that, they are also part of the New
York safety inspection, so they were pretty high on my list of things
that needed to be fixed. I looked into the wiper problem on
January 4th, the day after I picked the car up. The first thing I
noticed was the screen / grille assembly was not installed on the cowl,
it was in the trunk. I figured this meant the boyfriend had worked
on the wipers, and I figured that meant I was in for a big job. I
was right!
The first problem I saw was that the passengers side wiper
blade was stuck under the hood. I had to remove the retaining nut
from the pivot, and pry the wiper arm off in order to free the blade
from the hood. This is when I noticed that the pivot wasn't
attached to the wiper transmission. When I began to reinstall the
wiper arm, I then noticed that the pivot was worn out, and also needed
to be replaced. I then tried to turn the wiper motor on. The
relay was clicking, but the motor wasn't turning. A quick test
with the voltmeter verified that the motor was getting power. I
then pulled the loose transmission arm out of the cowl and discovered
that the connector on the end of it was broken.
With a shopping list developed, I put the wiper arm back on,
put the transmission rod in the trunk, and gave up for the day. On
Saturday morning, I took a ride to the auto parts store where I ordered
the new transmission arm, and bought a new wiper motor. My next
stop was the Nissan dealer, where I purchased a new pivot. I had
noticed on Thursday that one of the pivot nuts was frozen in place, and
the new pivot didn't come with nuts, so my next stop was the Home Depot
to buy 3 metric nuts to install the new pivot with. |