So I burned up my wiper motor...it's a long story, but basically the wipers ended up binding on something and then bam, everything shorted out. From then on every time the wipers would make it to park the fuse would blow (until I put a 30 amp fuse in...then my radio would just cycle on and off with the volt drain...stupid I know).

Anyway, I wasn't too stoked about buying a $55 wiper motor and I figured the worst I could do was break the broken one, so I took it apart.

First thing I did was take the case off the coils. There wasn't anything wrong with the coils (They all tested the same resistance) and the brushes looked to have a lot of life left. Getting the case back on was tricky because you have to get the peg lined up with that bearing with a hole in it and it keeps moving around. The only thing left was the part that was riveted together so I drilled the rivets out and this is what is in there:



Obviously the inside contact (the two colocated are the park sense contacts) was bent up and it was due to some plastic that had melted on the contact wheel.



I filed this down and smoothed it out. I suppose if you really wanted you could backfill with epoxy or something similar. I was on a time crunch and knew it would be raining the next day though so I didn't have time for that. It would probably be best though.

Looking at the other side I could see what was happening. The contact was bending up and contacting the case. There is a 12V supply to that and it was causing the short. Mine just happened to be in a place that the contact would only short briefly and the residual motion was driving it past the point where it was shorting, which is why it wasn't blowing the fuse as soon as I turn on the ignition, only after I cycled the wipers. I straightened the contact out, and as a precaution put electrical tape along the case behind both the contacts to prevent that from happening again. Again, a thin layer of epoxy is probably a better solution here because of the likelihood that the tape will eventually fall off and cause me grief by gumming up the works and all that. (Note: Electrical tape isn't in pic)



When you put it all back together, it's kind of tricky unless you have a rivet gun (I don't have one here). I tried that metal epoxy putty crap but it wouldn't hold the squeeze that it needed to make the contact. I chipped all that crap off and ended up no kidding just drilling the other holes out and then using wire twisted tightly to hold the works together. At somepoint I'm going to go back do the epoxy, and rivet it back together, or maybe even small bolts/nuts would work.

Took me about 1.5 hours. Longest part was figuring out how to get the damn wipers off...felt pretty dumb when I finally figured it out =)