Wiper Blades - A Buying Guide

After entering the registration number of your car on www.micksgarage.com, you may be presented with a number of choices of wiper blades.

The most important piece of information you need to know, is which kind of fitment the wiper arm on your vehicle is, in order to find the correct blade for you. 

Here are the different fitments

Fitting new wiper blades to your car is one of those little modifications that makes such a big difference. Combine them with a few other tips (that I’ll come to in a minute) and we promise you it will transform your driving experience in the rain.

Good visibility requires wipers that are in good condition. If your wipers are chattering, streaking or otherwise failing to wipe cleanly and consistently, you may need new blades. Here are some of the main tell tale signs:

• Streaking – A wiper blade’s rubber can harden or become damaged with age and weather, leaving fine beads of water or streaks on the windscreen.
• Chattering – A deformed wiper element can cause blades to judder across the screen, leaving radial streaks.
• Uncleared Margins – A deterioration in the wiper blades or decreased wiper pressure can leave parts of the windscreen unclear.
• Noise – Noisy wipers may be a sign that the wiper element is deformed or hardened, as a result, the wiper blade structure will then wear.
• Judder – A deformed wiper element, wrong adaptor or blade ageing can result in jerky and noisy wiper arm movement

If your wipers are suffering from any of the symptoms above then replacing them with some shiny new ones would be highly recommended.


Cleaning the screen:

• If you’re changing the wipers then to get the best out of them you really need to thoroughly clean the screen. Over time it will have built up countless layers of road tar, oil, sap and a whole multitude of other nasty stuff.
• Ideally use a special pre cleaner such as Meguinars Anti Insect Pre-Cleaner to strip all this gunk away and get back to the bare glass.
• Next a polish such as Turtle Wax ClearVue will smooth out small imperfections and give a less porous surface for the wipers to work against.
• Lastly apply a treatment of Rain-X to the windscreen. Rain-X is a hydrophobic treatment which reduces the surface tension of water on the windscreen, which in English means that that rain will bead off your windscreen just like it does off a Ducks back! (this stuff is awesome but don’t just take our word for it, we’re trying to sell it to you! check out these independent YouTube videos)

We made a demo video of all these products being applied. Check it out:

 

Buying & Fitting New Wiper Blades:


Choosing the right wipers for your car is extremely simple. At MicksGarage we have a clever Reg Lookup system that can identify all the parts fitted to your car, simply by entering it’s registration number into our website. Click here to find the wiper blades you need for your car.


Although fitting new wipers is really simple and anyone can do it, it’s much easier to show you how its done than try and explain here. Check out our demo video here 

- Words by Rob King