One Wiper Not Working How to Diagnose Wipers and Wiper Linkages

Great. Hey, friends, it's Len here from 1A Auto. So, today in the studio, I have a truck and what happened to me, of course, one of the wiper arms stopped functioning properly. Now, this is something that's gonna be more common, especially in the wintertime, and that's generally due to the fact that snow weighs a little bit. People overall are generally a little bit lazy, and so they don't end up cleaning up their windshield the way that they should. All that weight from the snow ends up holding down that arm a little bit, and, of course, the wiper assembly inside of the cowl right here is gonna be under a lot of stress and could potentially break. I wanna take a peek at what's going on, so let's get into it.

Now before I get too into this, of course, I wanna make sure that I know exactly what's happening. So I'm gonna go ahead and test it myself, I want to know. Okay, I see what's happening here. That passenger side wiper arm isn't functioning the way that it should, so we need to see what's going on. Now when diagnosing this, I'm just gonna jump right past trying to figure out if the motor itself is working. Why is that? Well, because one of the wiper blades is working perfectly, but the other one isn't. So I know that the motor's functioning properly, it has to be something else. You should never be able to grab on your wiper arm and be able to do this all free willy-nilly. Now there should be a nut located underneath this cover right here on the wiper arm. That nut is gonna hold the wiper arm to the windshield wiper regulator which is located underneath this cowl. I'm just gonna go ahead and use a pick, carefully get underneath this cover, pop that right off of there. Now here's the nut. The next thing that I wanna do is just try tightening this up. If it loosened up, then obviously, I'm gonna have an issue. Nope. So tightening the nut wasn't the issue. I can see that as I'm still doing this, it's actually moving the shaft that's attached to the windshield wiper regulator inside the cowl. So now the next thing that I'm gonna do is go ahead and take this nut right off of here. I'm just gonna carefully use this tool to pop this off, grab that wiper arm, and now we want to inspect it. Look inside here. You should see a whole bunch of little grooves. Those grooves that are inside there should match up right along here. If the grooves are stripped out on this area, or right inside this area, you know there's an issue. If the area inside here is stripped, then typically you would just go ahead and replace the wiper arm. If this area right here was stripped causing the issue, well, then, of course, you're gonna have to replace the regulator located inside. Let's go over and do the same to the driver-side wiper arm, and then we'll continue on by getting this off. Okay.

Now to remove the cowl, a lot of times you're gonna be able to find a couple of screws located on it. Sometimes along the corners here, or even inside some of these grooves. Just take a quick inspection, make sure you don't see any screws. If you do, go ahead and remove them. After that, we're gonna pop the hood and make sure there isn't any screws along this area as well. Now inspecting the long the engine compartment area here along the cowl, I don't actually personally see any screws on our particular application. But what I do see is long each of these sides, I have a push clip. So I'm just gonna go ahead and carefully get underneath this because I wanna reuse it. We'll pop it right up and out of there. Do the same to the other side. Now, with those both out of there, the next thing that you wanna do is make sure that you find your washer fluid hose. Now, this can be on either side of the vehicle. For our application, it's on the passenger side, and I know it's the washer fluid hose because it leads right up and inside of this collar right here. You just wanna try to find an area where you can disconnect it, but be very careful not to damage the hose in any way. I'm just gonna grab on to this. I'll give it a couple little twists and separate it. Inspect the hose, make sure that it's in good condition. If it's hard or dry or cracked in any way, it really only makes sense to go ahead and replace it now. Okay. Now I have a couple of clips that go across here. I'm just gonna go ahead and carefully pull on this, and slide it up and over. Do the same to the rest of the clips.

Okay. So now that we have the cowl out of the way, I have a nice clear over our wiper arm regulator here. We have our mortar, and, of course, we have the bars that come across that are supposed to make this function. Now what I wanna do is take a peek down inside here. Oh, look at that? I found the rod already. Yep, so the ball and socket came apart right here. Essentially, what's supposed to happen is when I power up the motor, this arm is gonna go back and forth and that's gonna make this thing essentially go back and forth as well. Without that being connected, well, of course, this can do pretty much wherever it wants which overall is nothing. Now that we have this out of the truck, we have a nice clear view of exactly what's going on. You can see the ball area of the joint here, and it has this little thing right on it right there. Then, of course, you have the socket area. This is supposed to slide right onto that ball, and then lock right in. You can see the way that it's supposed to sit. I let this go, well, you can see, that's definitely not gonna hold on there very tight. Little bit of prying, comes right off. So now at this point, if this was to have happened to me, the first thing that I would try to do is just try to pop that socket right back onto the attachment there. I wanna make sure that it's on there, and it's nice and secure. If I pop it on and it still feels like it wants to fall off, well, then we're gonna have to change things around a little bit. Okay. So with that popped on there, as you can tell, it's definitely not gonna sit on there very well. It's gonna wanna keep falling off. And, of course, the first time that I try to go to use these wiper arms, it's just gonna fall right off on me and it's gonna be a nightmare to take into part again. So at this point, we tried putting it back together and as you can tell, it just keeps falling right back off. So I need to go ahead and order myself a new wiper arm regulator assembly.

Now, this might take a little while to come in due to shipping, or sometimes you can't even get it at the general parts store in your location. If that's the case, more than likely, you're gonna want your wiper blades to work in between the time it takes between now and, of course, whenever the part comes in. Just in case it happens to rain. What I might try to do is get inside here, put it together, maybe use a little bit of tape or something. Something that has a little bit of flexibility to it, but it's still gonna try to hold it together. You could try some tape, you could try a wire tie, or anything the like. Essentially, we just kind of want to temporarily hold it together, that way there we can still have wiper blades while we're driving down the road. But for me personally, of course, the best case for this would be to just go ahead and replace the wiper arm regulator. Now I used the wire tie on this to temporarily try to fix it. Obviously, it's probably not gonna hold up if I have snow on the windshield, or if I'm using the wiper blades constantly driving down a long road or something the like. Essentially, the best thing to do would be, of course, to install a brand new wiper arm regulator. It looks just like this. Like I said before, it can take a little while to get one. Maybe you go to your part store and you can't even find one. A temporary fix like this is at least gonna be able to make it so you can drive around in case there's rain while you wait for your part to come in.

Okay, friends. So that's pretty much what I've got for you for how to diagnose if you're having an issue with one of your wiper arms. As you saw when we were diagnosing this, we have one wiper arm that functioned properly, and the other one just didn't do anything. We went ahead and tore it all apart and we inspected it and we found that it was a joint where one of the arms connects onto the regulator here. You can try to pop that back in. A lot of times if it pops out, more than likely the socket's damage. So you're just gonna have to go ahead and replace this. I hope this video helped you. I hope you learned a little something. If you did and you wanna talk about it, leave it in the comment section below because I always love to hear from you. Of course, if you liked the video, or even loved the video, please feel free to smash on the like button for me. It'll mean the world. While you're at it, go ahead and subscribe, ring the bell that way there you can be kept up with all of our latest content. Thanks.