I picked the wrong day. The weather bureau said there was a slight chance of a shower, probably in the morning. So I arranged to collect the E-Type Jaguar from its latest fettling in the afternoon.
The forecasters were wrong. Very wrong.
No sooner had I hit the freeway, down it came … big fat heavy drops on my newly restored freshly painted precious cat. “Never driven in the rain” will not be in the ad when one day I sell it.
I was in the fast lane, spray everywhere, using the wipers for the first time ever – when, with no warning, a wiper blade collapsed. To explain: To cover the curved wide screen on early E-Types, there are three wipers, not two. It was the middle blade and arm that disconnected, leaving the retaining spring dangling. Each swipe of the screen threatened an ugly scrape across the newly painted scuttle.
I immediately turned off the wipers. The broken blade stayed where it fell, laughing at me. There I was, at 100km/h, in steady rain with no wipers, boxed in, travelling in the fast lane of the freeway during that frantic overlap in time when tradies knock-off and school pick-up starts.
Did I decide to carefully make my way across to the emergency lane, pull over, jump out, get drenched, grab the broken bits, risking being wiped out by a distracted plumber talking on his phone while rushing to get home? No, I did not.
The loose wiper bits settled into their nest, sitting stable, despite the speed at which I was travelling. I just kept going, squinting through the rivulets streaming down the screen.
If I turned on the wipers, I risked the sharp stub of the wiper arm dragging back and forth, scratching the duco. If I just kept going, the worst thing that could happen would be that the wiper arm could fall off and be lost.
At home, Jag tucked into the garage, I inspected the limp central wiper. No damage to the duco whatsoever and the various bits were all still just sitting there.
Closer scrutiny revealed that the two tiny rivets that hold the wiper arm to the chrome covered stub had given up. The spring was still hooked in, so nothing seemed lost. Or so I thought.
It was easy enough to find the right size tiny rivets in my collection and to reconnect the arm to the housing, which itself is just pushed on to splines on the pinion of the wiper motor mechanism.
But when I went to reconnect the spring (essential to keep the blade in close contact with the glass) I discovered that the tiny retaining pin that it hooks on to was not there – vanished – gone to a better life somewhere else.
Finding the perfect size pin in my bits and pieces proved tricky. I went through all my nails, rivet shafts and so on with no success. Either too fat or too loose. A ‘Eureka’ moment came when it dawned on me that I was trying predominantly metric sized pins on a 1970 English car that has no metric sizes on it. A bit silly. Soon a 7/32-inch drill piece was found to be the perfect fit.
The angle grinder made short shrift severing the sacrificial drill bit’s shaft from its flutes, and the linisher belt shaved the piece down to a perfect length. The pin readily accepted being pushed into the housing and then all that was needed to finish this simple fix was to stretch the spring to hook over the new retaining pin.
Then the spring broke. On what could well be its 55th birthday, it decided it had had enough of life and snapped just as I pulled on the hook end to slot it over the brilliantly improvised newly engineered pin.
Where do I get a replacement wiper-arm spring in a hurry?
A quick inspection of the Jaguar supplier websites revealed that the exact size spring was not sold on its own, only as part of an entire new wiper assembly for $50 – plus freight of about that much again! So $100 for a spring seemed a bit OTT.
Never throw anything away, my Dad used to say. A quick fossick through my ‘Springs’ collection yielded something approximating the correct size, which was readily adapted with some elbow grease and a few twists in the vice.
Finally, with two new rivets connecting the arm to the housing, the ex-drill bit repurposed as a retaining pin, and the scrounged newly tensioned and extended spring hooked up at both ends, the entire piece slid back on to the splines.
Another irritating little repair on this astonishingly gorgeous car that I still pinch myself is sitting in my garage.