R129 wiper arm tidy up

[R129mine]

I recently purchased a cheap small car for the station run (trying to preserve the R129 a little bit, although it has already done 157k miles so not preserving very much) and noticed the wiper arms of this little run around were a bit rusty and had flaked paint etc.

So I cleaned that up and then had a good look at the R129 and the wiper blade was not in a much better state. Last night after work I took the wiper arm off and removed the 2 plastic covers
Gave it a quick clean up and sanded the wiper arm, primed it and gave it a coat of black gloss paint and 1x clear lacquer coat. The plastic covers received a coat of black bumper coating/paint.

I also applied some lithium grease to the wiper mechanism (only started doing that about 2 years ago) and put it all back together this morning.

The before and after pictures on the car don't really show very much due to the bright sun and the stupid angle I used but the before and post on the work bench show it a little bit better

Before


After

 

[ray_hennig]

We did that on our 124. Much better look.

Well lubricated too.

The only problem came when we realised that we got the engagement with the motor wrong, during reassembly. The result is that, when the wiper is switched off, it settles to the left and then twitches upwards by a couple of cms. Not a disaster but rather annoying.

RayH

 

[R129mine]

Wiper arm settled in nicely. It is funny when you put things back together you never seem to fully remember how it used to be in terms of resting position etc. I try to take before, during and after picture and even make some notes but I could for the life of me not remember how to take the plastic covering off. Luckily there is a good video of a 124 owner who shows how to take it apart although he seems to be using standard grease rather than lithium grease.

 

[ray_hennig]

It is funny when you put things back together you never seem to fully remember how it used to be in terms of resting position etc.

Yes. It was at the end of a long day and a few beers. No excuse really.

But we did manage to replace any old parts on my 400k Km car with better ones from the 20+ 124s that my chum has in his garden.

R