My husband is obsessed with wiper blades. He’s been buying on line and in person, all the hot new blades, new technology, promises of the cleanest of clean windshields, etc., for the last two or three months. He puts them on, tests them, takes them off and returns them, buys two sizes to avoid that irritating edge on the end of the passenger side blade that collects ice because it doesn’t make contact with the glass, etc.
He’s driving me insane. Seriously.
He returned 5 blades in the last two weeks. One more to go. This one of my main gripes about winter…the endless wiper blade discussion.
Your post answers your question by way of planned obsolescence.
Actually, I prefer the new asseblies to the inserts. When it’s snowing/raining/sleeting/hailing during a tornado in Spring in Chicago is precisely when I’ll need a new wiper blade. So I’ll get one. I can have it put on and be back on the road in under 5 minutes from the purchase because of the new clip system. The old way took a long time, and if you ripped the decaying rubber away from the blade, you were a different kind of screwed. This is better.
As **ralph124c ** mentioned above, the key problem is the new style of thin blades used now. It’s a bear of a job to line up the very thin and floppy rubber strip and two even thinner loose springy steel slats through all of the clips in the wiper arm without one of the three skinny bits popping out and the whole thing blows up in your hands.
Annoying when it’s dry and sunny, all but impossible when it’s dark and raining. If any of the clips on the wiper arm are the least bit bent, give up now.
I used to sell wiper blades and inserts. They are both a pain the ass to deal with. Anco refills don’t fit Trico blades. Trico refills don’t fit an Anco blade. Nothing fits a Bosch blade except a Bosch refill.
Selling inserts required two trips to the car, one to remove the blade (in the pouring rain) go inside install refill, and then back out to install same.
The deal with blades is that one SKU can fit a ton of different cars by including several different adapters in the package for different arms.
I used to be able to buy and replace those … inserts (or whatever the rubber things are called) pretty easily: just squeeze together the metal dealie, slide the old rubber out, and slide the new one in.
Changing the whole blade is trickier. It probably wouldn’t be so bad if I remembered how to do it, but I change them infrequently enough that, by the time I’m due for a new one, I’ve forgotten which of those silly little plastic thingies to use and how it fits on, and I have to spend the better part of an hour figuring it out. :mad:
You think not being able to get a refill is bad try finding a rear wiper for a 05 Subaru Outback. The only way I’ve been able to find one is through the dealer. The auto stores do not list them in the catalogs at all. I even tried to use one from a 04 which was listed, but it was too long and the clip was too thin. Fuckers make you by them at a jacked up price and you have to go out of your way to get it. I wonder if they’ll tell you only a certified mechanic can install it too.
When the blades wore out on the Saturn, I discovered that they were custom made for the Saturn and required shelling out the big bucks for replacements. Bye Saturn, hello Anco. At the time, I had always used natural rubber, which required getting a new set every four to six months (they started squealing and squeaking within a month). I decided to pay twice the amount for synthetics hoping they would last twice as long. That was five years ago. I’m still using the same blades—hell, I even replaced the windshield and am still using the original pair. To me, buying natural rubber is a waste of material, time, and money. It’s the blades that cost you in the long term, not the assemblies