Windscreen wiper rack replacement

[Peter Collins]

I was on the way home from the presscott hill climb E Type day in the pouring rain , wipers were working well but half a mile from home the drivers side arm stopped operating .When i got home on further ivestiagtion i discovered that the splines had gone on the output shaft connecting to the aluminium boss , my first thought was i could repair this but when i looked at the passanger side i saw that someone had had trouble in the past and had put a roll pin in . I felt that this would compramise the strength of the shaft so the only option would be to replace the whole lot . I have read the write up in the workshop manual , but wonder if any one else out there would have any tips on the easiest way to remove it.

[1954Etype]

I was on the way home from the presscott hill climb E Type day in the pouring rain , wipers were working well but half a mile from home the drivers side arm stopped operating .When i got home on further ivestiagtion i discovered that the splines had gone on the output shaft connecting to the aluminium boss , my first thought was i could repair this but when i looked at the passanger side i saw that someone had had trouble in the past and had put a roll pin in . I felt that this would compramise the strength of the shaft so the only option would be to replace the whole lot . I have read the write up in the workshop manual , but wonder if any one else out there would have any tips on the easiest way to remove it.

Peter, you dont have to remove the complete rack. You should be able to remove the end spindles by undoing the big chrome nut on top of the chrome bezel, remove the clip on the ball joint inside the bulkhead (just open the 'ears' on the clip) and IIRC, the spindle will come away. Not that difficult a job just fiddly and getting hold of a new part might be tricky.

[kingzetts]

Peter, you can certainly just remove the end spindle as suggested, there are also two small bolts/setscrews holding each spindle unit to the rack bracketry which need removing. You'll need to remove the dash top or the speedo and tacho to give you access - or maybe both.

Also, this may not be relevant, but what sort of wiper arms do you have? The conventional ones are a press-fit retained by a sort of spring clip, but there is another type (which my car happened to have when I got it) which have a screw in the end of the cap which goes on the spindle. This screw moves a wedge shaped clamping block inside the cap and clamps the arm to the spindle.

One of my arms would not clamp well onto the spindle, which turned out to be because the clamping wedge had split.

The splines on all my spindles are in poor shape, and I was pretty sure that the normal clip-on arms would not work so I tracked down a replacement clamp-type arm. These are not readily available but I found one via a specialist at Stoneleigh last year. His view was that the screw-clamped type tend to ruin the splines, but if your splines are already shot, using them can be an alternative to having to replace the spindle.