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Old 3rd June 2014, 17:21
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IanA IanA is offline
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Easy Washers
Thought I'd better make a start on preparing the Z3. I'd seen that washer jets on the bonnet would be of no use so I decided to put them on the wipers just like my departed Alfa Spider 916. I bought a pair of wipers complete with the wash jets, rubber tubes and two tube joiners. I bought a tee-piece joiner and a length of clear pipe.

First thing I did was cut the existing washer feed pipe:



That turned out to be a good guess because when re-routed around the scuttle, the end landed right by the passenger wiper spindle. I added the tee-piece and linked up the rubber pipe to the jet. Didn't even have to trim it.



I fastened the tube to the wiper arms using cable ties and covered them with black tape. Overkill really and likely to get untidy so may be removed.
Then I attached the new tube to the tee-piece and routed it over to the driver side wiper spindle. Cut to length and attached to the driver wiper rubber tube.



More cable ties and tape. I secured the runs of the pipe using cable ties with their "tails" trapped under the clip-on rubber trim around the scuttle. Seems to work quite well.

The finished (almost) job:



Tried them and a good drenching ensued. The wiper blade on the driver side fouled the windscreen frame at the top of the stroke so I roughly trimmed the blade. That may be a MOT-able offence but it wouldn't be difficult to properly trim the metal backing strip and re-instate the indents to secure the wiper end cap.



I saw that Mercedes has developed a wiper for convertibles with micro jets along its length actually through the blade. In this way they minimise the amount of water available to splash the occupants. Spoilsports.

For my next trick, I'll show you how I installed some of those kick@rse (if cosmetic) roll hoops you see on eBay.

Last edited by IanA; 3rd June 2014 at 17:23.. Reason: spellings
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