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Occasionally the wipers won't work. Problem has been present for a long time, probably for 10000 miles.
Typically when this happens, they wont' work at all for the entire time the vehicle is running. Once or twice in that time, they start working when I retry them without shutting of the vehicle and restarting it.
Sometime during this period, I checked the fuse when they were not working, and heard a barely audible buzz in the foot well. Found it is the wiper motor making the noise. I jiggled the connector and the wipers started working.
Since then, when the wipers don't work, if I'm stopped I can jump out, reach down and jiggle the cable and get them working. I can't reach it from the drivers seat while underway though.
This weekend I had some time and tried to diagnose it a bit. It was insanely crazy figuring out how to get the connector out, damn the engineers on this thing. Given that all the functions fail when it's not working, and they use different power wires (low, versus high), I figured it must be a ground wire that was intermittently loose. But all the wires and connector terminals look fine.
The ground wire at the connector has a 6 ohm resistance back to it's own ground lug. I should have checked some other ground to see if that is a typical resistance...it seemed high to me.
If the wiring is fine, without any intermittent faults, then I suspect the motor is just struggling to get started, and is tired from age. Next time it fails, I am going to give the wipers on the outside of the car a nudge to see if that gets them going.
Hi Toni. You can't get better diagnostics than the wiggle test. You found a major problem. 6 ohms on a ground is typically high. Grounds should be near zero as far as I know. If the connector is female, the problem may lie in the motor pins itself. Most likely corrosion.
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