[jyl]

On another front, my wipers stopped working.

The mechanism is hilarious, like something from a children's stop-action cartoon, think Wallace & Gromit. For the un-initiated, an electric motor rotates an eccentric linkage that pushes a shaft back and forth (like a piston, rod, and crank, in reverse), the shaft pushes a ribbed cable back and forth, the cable housing runs into the firewall and through the left and right wiper mechanisms. The ribs on the cable interface with the wiper shaft and rotates the shaft back and forth.

My old Land Rover had separate wiper motors mounted on the windscreen frame directly driving the wipers, and I thought that was funny. This is funnier. Its like you assigned the task of designing a wiper mechanism to children who'd never seen a wiper system and whose mechanical engineering experience was with Lego Technik.

Anyway, liberal use of WD40 into the cable housing cured the issue, for now, and I have "wipers" again.