The project car has been off to college since August so I haven’t posted anything lately. It came back for a fall break visit with my daughter complaining about the driver side windshield wiper. The arm was replaced early on with a generic part which was a mistake. Even factory arms have a reputation for bending out of shape and then not making complete contact with the windshield and generic parts fail faster.
Much of the left side was not wiped.
Hard to tell from these photos but the blade doesn’t make good contact on the left side of the windshield and this is a problem for the driver when needed. You can see how much I had to bend the arm to make even moderate contact and this is as much as I could improve it.
Even with arm bent a ridiculous amount the wiper blade wasn’t working well.
I even tried the suggested tricks to shave off some metal down at the base to allow the spring to pull the arm in tighter but that accomplished very little. The real problem here is the cheap substitute arm that I used the first time; it is weaker than the factory parts marked Bosch.
Because this is an important safety issue and because I already wasted money on a cheaper part, I bought an expensive factory part from the local Volvo dealer. Replaced it and now it wipes tight against the windshield like it should.
Genuine ($$$) arm has Volvo part number stamped on it.
Genuine arm is also stamped Bosch and probably made in Belgium.
Wiper properly clears the windshield with new arm.
$66 for factory wiper arm LH
1997 Volvo 850 Wagon Project 