Dear WeatherCat fans of a certain rascally wagon,
I finally have some news about my trusty wagon. I normally take her in to Orinda Classic Car Center over the summer so that they can give her the once over. With all the troubles I've been having that didn't happen until early November. Here is a photo of her headed to the service bay:
Aside from the usual quirks of a classic car, she checked fine -
but . . . . . . . . . .
We had a threat of rain for the day she was supposed to head over so I did my duty to winterize the wipers -
Oops! No wipers - absolutely dead. Fortunately, I was able to dodge the drops and since she was over there I asked the crew at Orinda Classic Car if the could investigate. Back in 2013, I had upgraded Biquette to an after-market interval wiper system. I thought there was little choice but to replace this system but the plot soon thickened.
The mechanics immediately recognized the wiper motor to be similar to one used on GM trucks in the 1980s. As it turns out, those motors have a logic circuit that were notorious for failing even immediately after the factory. Give the gang credit, they hunted around and narrowed it down to the exact model of wiper motor. They were able to then purchase a replacement locally.
Since they had confirmed that the motor itself was working fine, they tried to simply swap the logic board. Well that -
sort of - worked. All the functionality was back. However, instead of parking the wipers against the cowling, the wipers are being parked on the left-hand side! A little more detective work revealed the problem. While the circuit board was clearly based on the original GM model, the vendor custom soldered a few modifications to the stock board. Those tweaks to the electronics appear to have changed the parking position so that it would work with classic cars like my wagon.
There weren't any easy choices so I took Biquette home with her wipers parked on the left:
I contacted the vendor to see if they might have some old motors laying around, but after 10 years the answer was no. So I'm going to have to bite the bullet and upgrade to the latest version of this after-market wiper system:
I had been planning to do this for a long time actually. This newer model adds a built-in washer which obviously is a real plus. The trouble is that I will have to once more create the customizing adapter so that the wiper switch fits into the 1965 Buick A-Body dash. This was a real pain back in 2013. So much so that I had forgotten how I did it!
Obviously i can't take on this project for a while. So until I can, my poor wagon will be stuck with wiper parked in the wrong position!
Life is tough even for classic cars these days!
Edouard
