polifrog
Temporary Note for the month of October: If you find the post below useful please consider purchasing a round of popcorn from the link above for yourself , for the scouts and my son who's idea it was to put this on polifrog.
Thanks
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The family's Toyota Sienna's intermittent wipers became intermittently operational while traveling the National park circuit almost two years ago. Coincidently the slow setting would fail as well as the the "auto home" feature common on all autos today. Good timing was required when turning the wipers off otherwise the wipers would likely stop mid windshield. The only settings that worked consistently were the off setting and the high setting. Good enough ... ignored.
Well, it was ignored until a couple of months ago when we were increasingly reduced to one wiper setting ... off.
The wiper motor seemed fine so I was initially interested in hunting down the only the control relay. As it turns out a little research lead me to conclude that the relay is integrated with the wiper motor itself. With that knowledge and after a visit to
car-part.com a fifteen dollar replacement wiper motor was in hand.
The replacement motor replaces the one tucked behind the air filter housing.
Two mounting screws are easily reached from the front; the other two are hidden from sight but easily located as they are near the wiper arm pivot points.
Before removing the wiper mechanism, though, the wiper arms must be removed from the assembly. A plastic cap covers the nut that holds
the wiper arms to the conical splines of the wiper mechanism. Occasionally these nuts work loose striping the spline pictured to the right and requiring the replacement of the entire wiper mechanism. Be wary during reassembly.
With the wiper mechanism (sometimes referred to as a transmission) off of the van one can scribe the position of the arm that is attached directly
to the wiper motor. Perhaps this is an unnecessary step as a miss-match can be corrected for when reattaching the wipers, but I prefer to keep things as originally designed.
With the position of the drive arm marked and the drive arm removed the motor is easily removed from the mechanism. Once the new motor is bolted in place the scribing done earlier facilitates positioning the drive arm on the motor's spline. As a secondary conformation of the proper position of the drive arm I connected the motor to the van's wiring and ran the wiper mechanism while laying free.
I first ran it on intermittent. Note that the arm stops on the scribe:
I also ran it on low and high:
And finally tried it out on the van:
For those interested, out of curiosity I took the old wiper motor apart. Removing the cover revealed the failed electronics that control speed,
intermit, and wiper stop. There was also some corrosion that was most visible on the inside of the plastic lid as though the motor had been splashed with salt. Under the electronics was the worm gear that ran the drive arm.
out