Repaired inoperative Wipers

[donagain1]

I recently had two issues with my '85 Carrera Cabriolet, which I never addressed because in the 18 years I've owned the car I seldom if ever drove it in inclement weather (yeah, fair weather enthusiast). Neither the defroster nor the wipers worked. I've outlined the defroster on another thread, so here I'll describe the fix for the wipers.

As I had the fresh air blower box removed because of the other problem, the "wiper relay" was exposed, and I left it that way in case it or the wiper motor itself were the cause of the trouble. Turns out neither were.

The wiring schematic refers to the wiper "relay" as the "Pulse Transmitter", which when you think of it, is really a better description of what it does, which is provide a pulse of some duration to start the motor operating, and that duration depends upon which switch contacts trigger the pulse. If it is triggered by the windshield washer contacts, its duration will be for a couple of sweeps followed by one more sweep courtesy of the blade parking camswitch in the motor itself. If it is triggered by the Intermittent Wiper Knob on the dash, it'll be a single pulse to start the motor, followed by others, whose interval is determined by the variable resistance applied to the circuit courtesy of the potentiometer behind the knob. Neither of these work so well if battery isn't making it through the stalk switch.

There's a number of threads dealing with the stalk switch, so there's no need to revisit everything discussed in them, except to say the sometimes not so obvious (though it should be), namely check the easiest thing to deal with first. In the case of the stalk switch, that would be the fuse in position 7, it provides the battery. If it's good, while you're there pull the horn relay out, because the next thing you're gonna do is remove the steering wheel, the column switches housing, and ultimately the Wiper Switch. Before fiddling with the switch, scooge under the dash and pull the round, black, 6-pin connector from the footwell, and while you're under there, untie or otherwise loosen the bundle of cables that might restrict it from being removed through the steering column hole. Then you can remove the wiper switch from the bracket and remove it from the car.

You'll see that it's not a hermetically sealed microswitch, as is the case with the adjacent cruise control (to you, that's Tempostat) switch. Maybe it's because my car's a Cab and subject to a lot of dust and moist air, but the contacts in the switch were SO grimy that they might as well had insulation on them. Before doing anything else, clean and burnish all the contacts. Don't try to figure which does what, or screw around with a meter to check their operation. Just clean and burnish them, plug the connector back in and see if everything works. Chances are it will, unless you've gotten ham-handed and bent something while cleaning the contacts, then you're out the $62 bucks or so for a replacement switch.

That's what my situation was, and all is well now.