Category: Progress

Another thing I got to this weekend while Finn was asleep was to pull out the A/C ductwork under my dashboard. It was inoperable when I got the truck, although there was power to the blower fan. There was no compressor on the engine and the supply/return hoses had been cut just outside the firewall. Figuring it would be a number of years and several Lotto tickets before I’m able to buy an aftermarket A/C system, and because I’d like to get under the dash itself to replace bulbs and fix electrical gremlins, I decided to yank it out.



The vent bar came out easily (in part because one of the bolts was already missing) and the PO had thoughtfully installed quick connects on all of the wiring. Once that was out, I tackled the condenser unit under the passenger’s side. This was trickier because my glove box latch is hopelessly broken, so I jimmied that open, removed the box liner, and pulled the door off. There are four bolts holding it onto the firewall, three in the wheel well and one in the engine bay. They all came off so easily I had to look around to see if anyone was pranking me.

Once that was disconnected and the hoses underneath came off, the whole assembly lifted right out. It’s definitely seen better days. The picture here doesn’t show five pounds of dog hair and mud caked into the rear of the condenser unit.

Now I can get underneath and sort out the wiring, replace all the bulbs, and (possibly) even pull the purple dash off and replace it with the black one I refinished four years ago. But I’ll have to be careful not to anger the Scout electrical gods.

I carved out a few hours this weekend to look at the wiper motor assembly, and made a little progress. I was able to unmount the motor from the windshield, link the arm up with the motor housing, attach the clip, and rotate the motor enough to get it close to the mount points. That was where things got difficult. The torque on the motor is enough that I couldn’t rotate it on all three axis to get each of the three bolts to go in cleanly. No amount of cajoling, pushing or pulling would give me the leverage I needed to get it in properly. I figure what they did at the factory was put the motor and arm in as one assembly and then link the arm up to the passenger’s wiper arm. I tried disconnecting the linkage there, but couldn’t disconnect the two arms from each other for love or money. Out of time and patience, I bolted the motor up tightly at one point, put the cowl on, and left it until spring.

This evening after the sun went down, I cracked the cowl on Peer Pressure to start troubleshooting the wiper issue. I ran the engine up for about ten minutes in the afternoon when I got back from Harbor Freight; in the bag was a battery charger and a test light (along with an oil catchpan and an air fitting for my compressor).

Looking over the connector to the motor, I put the test light on it with the key at ACC and the wiper knob on low. After I found a consistent ground, the hot wires tested good. Puzzling.

I put my tester on it and got power in an acceptable range. More puzzling; it was looking like the motor was bad. I peeked under the cowl to size up the bolt positions, and…

…realized the wiper arm was sitting on the bottom of the inner cowl. Which meant it wasn’t connected at all. I reached in and verified it was completely loose. I cleaned the contacts in the connector with some sandpaper, hooked it back up, got back in the truck and turned the wipers on low. Immediately I heard the whirring of the motor. I’d never checked it with the engine off, so I celebrated with a smack to my own forehead.

Now the problem is getting the motor off the mount so that I can access the arm linkage enough to slide a spare clip on the housing. As I was coaxing the first of three bolts off the ladies called me in to dinner, so I tightened everything back up (the forecast is for 0% rain for the next couple of days), hauled all the tools inside, and called it a night.