Slow wipers

Cliff R · Post by **Cliff R** » Sun Oct 12, 2014 9:25 pm

I have noted over time on the forum people speaking about things electrical within their older Subaru's operating slower than what they were supposed to.
Such things as electric windows I think were mentioned.
I have noted over time the wipers on the MY have been moving slower and slower so I was going to look at the wiring including connection points etc.
I have had the panel off the car that sits under the wiper blades and runs across the car, below the windscreen as I was going to start the cars repaint with practicing on this panel.
Today, I decided to put this panel back on so I could look at getting the car to the panel beaters to sort out the holes in the roof from the screw on roof rack rails but before doing this I decided to dismantle and lube up the wiper linkages. There are the shafts for each wiper arm and a number of ball joints.
I pulled these apart, cleaned everything, lubed things up (used bearing grease cause that's what I had) and put it all together again. Everything was dry and I could feel a bit of resistance especially in the wiper arm shafts.
The end result is, the wipers now go at least twice as fast as they previously did.
I would suggest to everyone to look at doing this work if they are experiencing wiper speed issues.
Note - where the wiper arm shafts go into the plastic housings they are held in place with what appeared to be a circlip. The thing I found with the 82 model MY is the circlips are not made of spring steel as I expected. The clips seem to be made from simple mild steel so they bend very easily. I suggest being carful in removing them and putting them back on as I imagine these clips wouldn't be too hard to break.
In all, a very worthwhile job done.

steptoe · Post by **steptoe** » Mon Oct 13, 2014 7:00 am

i can hear one of my brumbys sounds dry in this area, been thinking some woolfat will do nicely. thanks for the reminder and reinforcement of my train of thought on this

RSR 555 · Post by **RSR 555** » Thu Apr 30, 2015 12:05 am

Yeah, should have done this to Honeycomb about 2 years ago, then they might have not busted. I ended up not driving it if it looked like it was going to rain. I found Rain-X was also a great help in making wipers work efficiently