Rover Vitesse, Wiper Arm Swap

One of the things that has bothered me about Tess is the wipers. The RH one sits too high, and they are the weird old pin fitting.

Being the sneaky one I am, the plan was to swap the standard J-Hook style arms from Effie to Tess, so that I could easily get replacement blades instead of just refills.

You can see how much higher the RH wiper on Tess sits compared to Effie here. The wiper on Effie is almost obscured by the bonnet and well within the dark strip at the bottom of the screen, whilst Tess sits high and is visible in the drivers vision. It’s a real small thing, but bothers me.

Wipers are easy as to remove on these things. Just a 13mm nut to remove and then the arm can be wiggled off the spline

This is the difference between the two. Tess has the one on the left, where the blade is held on by a metal pin. The one from Effie on the right uses a standard J-Hook. Replacement blades to suit the pin style are less common, whilst J-hook ones are everywhere as its standard on a lot of modern Japanese cars.

Good and bad news, the arm from Effie fit Tess

But the arm from Tess didn’t fit Effie. The spline size is different for some reason; Tess has a bigger spline and the arm won’t engage on Effie. I had to swap them back over and live with the pin arms on Tess, but at least I did manage to align the arm height better. The LH arm can’t go lower without catching the windscreen surround but that’s fairly normal.

With that disappointment I moved inside the car to have a play. Mrs Petrol pointed out my ugly missing label on my computer the other day and reminded me to fix it

Luckily I have some spare buttons, so I harvested a label. I could swap the whole button over, but to do that you need to remove the front panel, which means risking ruining the whole thing as the front panel is the only thing holding all the buttons and springs behind them, in place. I used a razor blade to carefully pry the label off the button

and stuck it back on with its existing adhesive. If it comes loose I’ll look into a dab of glue to secure it

Don’t worry, I have started cleaning the grot too, but that’s another post, when I have finished.

I removed the dash mat for the first time and to my surprise, it was hiding some goodies. No idea what the rubber gasket goes to, but the screws and washers are for various dash trim bits, and the spanner is for my collection.

So that’s where Tess is for now. I really need to pull finger and start getting her ready for the show, but unfortunately I’m going to have to spend some time on Effie very shortly as once again, she needs some coolant work 🙁