Okay, so since buying my MX5 a month ago I’ve come to the realisation that my windscreen wipers are doing something they shouldn’t… They work fine, I can’t argue that they don’t clear the water from the glass.
However, when I turn them on they go down towards the bonnet first, they hit the plastic at the bottom of the windscreen and then begin their upward wipe as you’d expect. The hitting the bottom of the windscreen makes a noise that I’m sure is damaging the wiper blades.
I attempted to quickly remove the wiper arms on my lunch break with no success so I’ll give that a go tonight to see if I can turn them to stop them hitting. Does anyone have any other solution? Is the motor meant to go down first and then up? It seems a little odd that it would need to do that.
Remove the arms and refit slightly further up .There are other things you can do but try the above first .Remove the nut (under plastic cover at bottom of arm) and lift the arm up to 90degrees to windscreen then wriggle them free.Easy job .Arms are on tapered spline so they tend to be awkward to remove
The wiper arms/blades should rest in the horizontal position, parallel with the bottom of the windscreen,when in the “park” position.On starting,the wipers should sweep up first.Looks to me that either the arms are in the wrong position or the crank arm drive on the wiper motor is not in the correct position.
After having a think about it and watching how the system worked, I realised that as missfire had the correct solution. As the wipers were beginning their rotation on the shaft, the connecting rod was at the point where it should be just before the end of the cycle. So it was going down and then starting its cycle. I removed the M8 nut and then the connecting rod and let the motor do a couple of full cycles. I then put the rod back on at the point where it would be when it starts the cycle. It’s all working correctly now, although I may have to turn the wiper arms a few degrees as suggested by MX5 123. Thanks for the replies guys!