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Old 09-19-2017, 05:36 AM   #14
scooterdudetim1
Junior Member
 
Brand: Thor Motor Coach
State: Missouri
Posts: 11
THOR #4471
Windshield Wipers get stuck

Thank you all for your replies to my dilemma.

So I got the wiper arm off by taking a large flat head screw driver and putting it between the back of the wiper blade and the face of the large mounting nut that is covered by a rubber protector. The tapered spline nut remained on the shaft. No matter where I placed the wiper blade on the splined nut, counterclockwise or clockwise, it still continued to get stuck on the driver side. I called my local RV repair shop and the guy there told me that I have to take the rubber protector off of the large mounting nut and tighten that large nut, as the entire bearing/driveshaft assembly was spinning with the wiper blade. He told me to stop the drivers wiper when it was in the vertical position and then line the passenger wiper driveshaft up at the same angle that the driver side was In. After tightening the nut and reassembling the wiper blade on the driveshaft, it continued to get stuck on the driver side. So I took the wiper blade back off and tried realigning the bearing/driveshaft assembly in a different position counter clockwise, then reassembled the wiper blade and it still got stuck on the driver side.
I started to get suspicious of what the drive linkage was doing under the hood in regard to this issue. So I activated the wipers and watched the drive arms and linkage travel until they got in the stuck position. I noticed that the Z shaped arm on the motor output shaft would bend from the motor torque when it was in the stuck position. It was bent so far that it was actually scraping against the motor mount bracket and the bolts that held the mounting bracket in place. I took the Z shaped arm off of the wiper motor output shaft and noticed that there was a crack in the steel right where the angle changed in the Z configuration. I straightened the arm back out, and then put some JB weld over the cracked area in an attempt to help reinforce the joint. The first time I reactivated the wipers after reinstalling the arm, it got bent again right back to the same position as before. I also noticed that the arm for the passenger wiper that is on the underhood side of the bearing/driveshaft assembly would also bend under the torque of the motor when the wipers got stuck. The arm appeared to be connected to the bearing/driveshaft assembly in a press fit condition on the end of the driveshaft, but it had become wollered out due to the lateral motion that the motor torque caused when the window wipers were stuck. From the underside of the hood, the entire bearing/driveshaft assembly is concealed in a fiberglass box that looks like it was cast at the same time that the front fiberglass body was cast. In other words, there was no way that I could see to actually get to the bearing/driveshaft assembly without pulling either the windshield or the entire front dashboard on the inside of the cabin.
So I took the wiper blade off again and repositioned the bearing/driveshaft assembly a little bit further counterclockwise. As I was tightening the large nut back down again, the threaded stem that the large nut tightens on to and secures the bearing/Driveshaft assembly to the body snapped, and I was then just screwed.
I ended up having to take the passenger wiper arm off and just travel down the road with the drivers wiper only. Better one than two that get stuck!! Luckily I only had to travel from Long Beach to north of Los Angeles.
When I returned home, I went out to the RV The next morning and started it to move it into the driveway to do some work on it. The windshield wiper that was still operating now would not shut off at all. If I turned the engine on and off multiple times, sometimes the wiper would stop on its own. It seemed to do it the most when I would push the wash button on the end of the wiper arm control. As the RV was scheduled to go cross country with another driver that day, I ended up having to wire in a switch that would turn the power on or off to the wiper motor. The RV made it to the middle of Colorado, then the wiper motor would not turn on at all, regardless of the position of the switch that I wired in. The new driver checked all the fuses in the box under the hood, but could not determine if any of them were blown. He ended up just driving it from the middle of Colorado to Kansas City with no windshield wipers at all.

In summary I would say that there is a design flaw that had occurred in the windshield wiper system on this RV.
I believe that the momentum generated by the large wiper arms and blades when in the fast setting, and definitely when in windy conditions, is too great for the size of the bearing/driveshaft assembly, the connector arms, and possibly the linkage, to control all the way back to the motor output shaft.

The RV is scheduled to go in the shop on Tuesday 9/19, So I will update on what it takes to fix this design flaw permanently when we get it out of the shop.
People's lives are in jeopardy due to this condition.
We intend on publicizing the results on as many platforms as we can In order to get Thors attention as to the severity of this problem.
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