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7/17/00 -- This wound up to be an all-day project, primarily for paint coat drying. For some reason, one of the previous owners slapped a thick coat of flat, ugly powder blue paint over the entire windshield wiper motor, including the wires. I'm assuming to cover up some minor rusting and to prevent further corrosion. The photo on the left is after I wiped the dirty motor off with some paint thinner! Yechh. The photo on the right is how it looks now. Yay!
I really shouldn't complain, because the motor works like a champ and besides, refinishing it gave me something else to do. I'm just not happy if I'm not doing something to restore or otherwise improve this car! The engine shelf is still covered with a layer of bubbling, nasty, undercoating type stuff -- as well as the brackets that hold things like the wiper motor, clutch and brake master cylinders, etc. When I do the body work on the car, this area will be restored. Fortunately, as a result of the coating, there is very little rust beneath and what little there is, is very light surface rust which I've already brushed off and applied Extend to. The engine shelf is really quite ugly, however.
I decided to repaint the wiper motor in a two-tone finish. The original as I recall, was simply bare metal. To fight corrosion and to enhance the look, I chose a silver and black Hammerite paint combination finish.
Step one was to remove the windshield wiper arms which simply pulled right off! Next was to unscrew the wiper cable that feeds into the motor. To release the cable, you must remove the four small bolts that cover the little "top hat" area of the motor. By the way, turning the top hat regulates the stop position of the wiper blades. Removing this cover, which is still attached to the motor by a wire and positioning it out of the way, revealed the cable and the shaft that it is connected to. I had to wipe some heavy grease off the top of the shaft, which revealed a retaining clip and directly beneath it, a contact piece with a little copper arm that rides along the underside of the top hat piece.
Carefully prying the retaining clip off, I set it aside and then removed the contact piece and took a picture of them for you to take a look at. Once these two pieces were removed, I was able to carefully lift the cable termination arm off of the shaft. I then replaced the top cover, removed the four bolts that hold the wiper motor mounting plate to the engine shelf and lifted the whole assembly away.
Note: Upon reassembly, I discovered that it might not have been necessary to remove the two small bits as illustrated above after all. There is a peg which cannot be seen on the underside that connects the cable to the arm shown above. You should be able to release the cable from the arm this way. Had I known this during disassembly I might have saved some time later. Getting that retaining clip back on was not particularly easy.
Since this was merely a cosmetic operation and not a mechanical rebuild, I opted NOT to take the motor apart for the sake of painting it, though that probably would have yielded the best results. To be candid however, I was afraid of messing somthing up and wind up with a handful of parts that I didn't know what to do with. After tightening down the top cover with the four small bolts, I plugged the hole where the cable normally enters, but some glass bead got inside anyway, which I had to remove. Afterwards, I added a bit more grease again to compensate for the stuff I had to wipe out.
My beadblaster was woefully inadequate against the thick, rubbery paint that was on the motor and I discovered that I achieved much better results attacking the paint with a small wire brush that was able to reach most of the cracks and crevices in the assembly. This was much faster than the bead blaster, but still very tedious. Rather than become frustrated with how long it was taking me, I turned up some music, sat in my favorite Adirondak chair in the shade of a tree on my front lawn and went to work attacking that blue paint as if it were "the enemy". When I was finished about an hour later, I blew everything clean with some compressed air and turned my attention to the mounting bracket.
The mounting bracket has three rubber grommets that look like they'd be very difficult to replace. Since they appeared to be in relatively good shape, I worked around them, attacking the rust and gunk on the bracket with the same small wire brush.
When it came time to paint, I first wiped the motor down with paint thinner to make certain that it was clean, then I masked off the actual motor cover for painting black later and applied a light coat of white automotive primer to the rest of the assembly. That stuff dries quick, so shortly thereafter, I sprayed the first of three light coats of silver Hammerite to the bottom side of the motor. Then, I returned my attention to the mounting bracket once again.
Not wanting to paint the rubber (and not wanting to remove it, either, for fear of not getting it back on in one piece, I snipped off the fingertips from one of my disposable latex gloves and fit the latex over the rubber grommets before spraying the bracket black. I alternated spraying coats on the bracket and the motor until both sides of each had about three coats.
Here's what the motor looked like at the halfway point. It was looking a lot better already! Restoring the wire to bare and not painting over the contact on the top hat looks nicer, too.
After letting the paint dry for a few hours I went back and masked off the the newly painted areas by covering them with (once again) a couple of latex gloves and masking off around the "barrel" of the motor. This technique worked really, really well! The Hammerite provides a durable, protective finish that looks great. It's the same finish that was used in the restoration of the Triumph AM radio used for my stealth audio "time machine" project.
Please. Always wear your seatbelt while driving -- and that goes double for your children if you have any.