The Stovebolt Site Forums The Shop Area The Electrical Bay Electric wiper

Anyone here ever tried to install a universal electric wiper motor like the one you can get at auto zone for around fifty bucks?

Some of those might work...or might be adaptable, but you'll have some work to do. We don't know what sort of truck or vehicle you have, so it is hard to say, but you'll at the very least need to make some special brackets for the AD truck and the arm may not be correct. Good luck.

When you buy Newport or something similar, you are paying for their engineering.

It’s a 1950 Chevy 3100.

I have a New Port wiper motor, but getting it installed and adjusted properly is giving me fits.
I don't think that I would be interested in attempting to try to install a motor not "engineered" to work on these trucks. I am having enough "fun" trying to install the one that I have which is "engineered" to work.

After I installed my LMC motor, it wouldn't work right no matter I did. I stared at the action for a long time and concluded the passenger side arm was too short for the new motor.

I cut the arm and attached it to an adjustable extender I made. All I can say is "It works just fine."

My .02 cent. I installed a Newport electric on my 52 panel and it worked like a dream. All good.

.....its been a while but if my memory is correct, ( I could check receipts) but there are two numbers for them. The one i used stated it did not interfer with the choke, or vice versa, and the number had a "C" at the end of it.
Go ahead and spend the money on a good one. Do it once, do it right because it taint easy to work under the dash!! I think I made one small adjustment at the wiper blade and never had a problem the 7 years I drove it.... and yes, I drove it in the rain quite a bit.

Having done a good bit of work on these (including developing a correct delay circuit which can be found here but is not a Tech Tip), I can tell you 2 things: paying more won't mean your wiper will run better nor quieter and 2...the ones sold on eBay work just fine and may need a bit of adjustment of the brackets. Or not. Some of them fit straight on and others will need to be bent just a wee bit to make the holes line up perfectly.

But as I said first, the wiper motor is inside the cab (as opposed to on the other side of the firewall as was common in vehicles made from around 1955 on) and you will naturally hear it. I've tried to minimize this by using rubber mounts, rubber washers, insulation around the motor, etc and you can reduce it to a degree. I get questions occasionally about this and there's no magic bullet...nothing you can do (aside from chopping a lot of stuff up to move your motor outside) will eliminate the sound of the motor and the dashboard being metal just magnifies that noise. The electric motor makes a noise completely different from a vacuum motor and the mechanism needed to stop/reverse the motion doesn't help. Otherwise, good luck.

Thank you all for the input. I believe I’ll look at one at Auto Zone and decide if I can fabricate a bracket for it.

Joe, here's a tip for you. Those motors won't have quite the "oomph" as some others, so please remove your wiper bezels and remove your wiper transmission arms and the rotating parts which work the wiper arms. Get those as clean and free-wheeling as you possibly can. The less drag you have in those, the better things will work for you. Good luck.