Friday 5 October 2012

Finding the correct Rainbow wiper spares

The screen wipers that came with the car look to be period style. I am not sure if they are original ones that came with the car, but they are ended old.

The brand is Rainbow made in England, and luckily the chrome was in superb condition so just some metal polish made them shine again. But the wipers rubber was an other issue, as they where completely dry and cracked.

Finding original spares for the rubbers was impossible even thought  I made a lot of googling, so I ended up having 2 possibilities:
-finding some rubbers that I could adapt
-or buying 2 new modern reproduction wipers, which of course would be my last option as I just did want to re use the original ones and invest money on other parts

Finding the correct rubbers proved to be a challenge, because after many visits to some car spares dealers, non of the modern wipers had rubber that looked similar to what I need, and they where expensive as they had both the rubber and the metal wiper. So I thought that I could try to find the rubber spares sold by meter as once heard that in the old days it was possible to buy.

But again, no one had the rubber part by meters, so I ended up going to shop on the old city part of Madrid where I thought would be my last chance. Fortunately I found what I was looking for, but not cut by meter, it was already precut in universal length.  The brand sis “Refil”


You can see on the image the section of the original rubber at the left and the new one at the right, notice that the new one had a 2 step base.


What I did was to cut the lower step base with an X-acto blade so the metal sides of the wiper would hold it in place securely.


I had to bend all the metal sides of the wiper with great care just enough to hold the rubber, but finally the result was nice. After fitting the wipers in the car, they proved to work correctly.




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