The new motor arrived yesterday, well I say new,it was new in 1971, not so much now. It worked perfectly but got taken apart for a good clean anyway, the grease was quite dried up so I think it was as well to do that. I removed the bits I needed from the first mini assembly and then rebuilt using the 2 speed motor with it's park switch. I tried to wire up the Corsa switch but found the internal wiring to be incompatible with the mini's park switch so I installed a Durite dedicated wiper switch instead, I still had to add a relay but at least it's now compliant in that it has 2 speeds, one of more than 45 sweeps per minute and the wipers park outside of the driver's vision.
The wipers were a bit of a bargain that I picked up at Newark auto jumble, they are adjustable for length, the angle of the blades at rest can also be adjusted, making them perfect for non standard installations. I still had t cut them down a bit to get the maximum coverage and best pattern but I am sure they will pass just fine, they probably clear a bigger percentage of the screen than the ones on my daily driver. Only cost 20 quid for 2 arms and two blades, can't be bad, I just hope they clear the screen well enough, I won't know that until I actually have a screen.
For those of you that want to know, the circuit diagram for the wipers looks like this -
It may not be obvious but the function of the park switch is not just to switch off the power only when the motor reaches the rest position - it also shorts the motor to ground to prevent the running motor turning in to a generator. If it didn't have this the motor could continue rotating long enough for the park switch to become deactivated, in which case the motor would then be reenergised. Shorting it to earth kills the back emf and stops the motor pretty much dead.
It was a massive pain, the air vents had to be cut out and then rewelded when the new mechanism was in place, I still have a problem that the end of the toothed cable that runs the wipers is rubbing on the driver's side so it makes an annoying noise, shouldn't be too hard to fix, apart from that they are working perfectly. Just for a change I had a bit of luck, these things have 3 different sized wheels in the gearbox that allow either 90, 110 or 120 degree sweeps, my original one was only 90, the second one was much better at 110 but the third one turned out to be a quite rare 120 degree unit - happy days. the tip of the wiper on the driver's side now reaches almost to the edge of the screen, there is no way it could be any more so I am 100 % sure of a pass in that respect.
The roof lining is proving to be much more of a problem, there are all sorts of brackets and supports in the way and it's really hard working out how best to sort it. One of the things that makes it awkward is that way Ford built roofs back in 1940 something, they had a great big hole that used to be covered with cloth, the way it was done makes life awkward. the hole itself is now covered with a fibre glass panel so that's sorted but covering the rest is tricky. While looking at options I hit on what I think is a pretty cool idea. Currently the car has no interior lighting, it's just not something I really considered, it will never be a daily driver so I never thought about it. However, looking at the channel that runs around the roof aperture I suddenly got an idea. Some of you may have seen the lighting I did for my mate's american diner, they are controlled by Arduino micro controllers and can be set up to do some incredible multi colour displays. Each LED is individually addressable and can be set to any colour or ny brightness at any time. This means I can control them to light the cabin in any colour, to dim or brighten in according to ambient light or to leave it running a combination of chase patterns if it ever goes to a show. Cunning eh?
To get an idea of what is possible, here is the set up I did at the diner, it's only running one pattern here, I have a library of just under 60 patterns that I can use.
Now I just have to finish cutting out all the bits I don't want, I may need to make a panel for the front part of the roof to tidy things up a bit in that area. At least I have a plan now, which I didn't an hour ago.
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