Single-arm wiper chatter: Adjusting park position helps!

[JayDee4711]

You have a Benz with a single-arm wiper? The wiper chatters and squeaks the last 30 or so degrees of the sweep towards park position? You don't like noisy wipers? Read right on! My W210 wagon was driving me nuts with its wiper noise. It doesn't rain a lot here in California, and I found that after long periods of non-use, the chatter was even worse. Trying to adjust the angle of attack of the wiper blade helped for about two minutes. RainEx, a new blade and couple other things I tried helped even less. So I decided to make peace with the wiper, accept the noise as an inherent property of the single-arm wiper, and be happy about the fact that it does not rain so much. That was when I bought my CLK W208 with the exact same type of single-arm wiper. And that bugger would not chatter, squeak, make any noise at all, or leave stutter marks on the windshield. Briefly, it would behave exactly the way I want a wiper to behave: Don't bother me, just wipe that windshield! So what was the difference? The W208 parked the wiper at the very end of the downward sweep, so the blade-part of the wiper blade was perpendicular to the windshield. The W210, in contrast, would park the wiper just a tad later, at the very beginning of the upward sweep. And that would make the rubber blade flip over and come to sit at an angle, pointing down. Then I would activate the wiper after an extended period of non-use (remember the infrequency of rain here) with the rubber blade settled in the angled position. Not a big issue during the sweep over to the passenger side: The blade would be dragged behind the wiper -- and be perfectly silent. On the way back, though, the rubber blade would be too stiff to properly flip over, and the wiper would push blade first, which leads to the exact symptoms described above. A simple, short-term fix is manually flipping the wiper blade each time you park the car after having used the wiper. I tested, and verified, my hypothesis over several months by doing this, and I have a hard time getting out of this acquired habit now. So I had to find a permanent solution. Research on a number of forums revealed that you can adjust the park position of the wiper, and that would do the trick. There are several threads about how to remove the wiper assembly. Find your own for your model, I would suggest. Keep the key in your pocket to save you from missing fingers afterwards, and other disclaimers, yadiyah... One thread in a UK forum describes how to adjust the park position: http://forums.mercedesclub.org.uk/sh...t=35032&page=3. The key is the image attached to the second post on that page: http://forums.mercedesclub.org.uk/at...2&d=1201270364. In my case, the wiper now parks at the dead end of the downward sweep, and I have done the manual workaround for long enough to be reasonably confident that that was it. Took me about an hour, not taking into account the inevitable dropped screw that found its way down the better part of the engine bay before I could retrieve it. Hope this helps others who mind wiper noise as much as I do... JayDee

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[JayDee4711]

Update after a couple of months: Yes, it does silence that wiper permanently.