How does one wire up the wiper motor???

[450Nick]

Hi all, I'm just trying to wire up the wiper motor on my Tuscan Challenge car and I'm a little confused by the connector. Basically the connector on the front has been damaged, so the front plate is not fixed and has come loose. This is fine, I was just going to put it back on, but there appears to be a very odd system behind this plate.

The connector its self (a white plastic connector designed to accecpt 5 male spades), has 3 female spade connectors attached to the other side (red, yellow and blue). Since I only need my wipers to be on or off for racing, I thought I'd just wire directly to these 3 wires and bin the dodgy white connector. So I set about opening up the connector to figure out what the 3 wires out the back did and then got confused. When you look behind the front plate, you see that there are 5 copper contacts, all with strange shapes which appear to bridge connections somehow, or just run very close to each other, making it difficult for me to figure out where the current is actually going! Two of which are loose and so could easily catch on other contacts, creating short circuits.

Here is a drawing of the front of the connector:


This is obviously not the exact one I'm using, but it appears to be the same connector, and the earth is in the same place. Looking at the diagram, the bit of the existing harness I have plugged into the top (earth) and both bottom sockets (probably not what it says on the diagram, but I would imagine fast speed and the switch connector. These two wires then connect directly to a toggle switch, with one half also being supplied with 12v via a piggyback connector.

The three wires which I talked about previously (red, yellow and blue), are connected to the top and both left hand side sockets (fast & slow speed on this diagram). So it appears that one of the front connectors is not connected to the corresponding connection on the back. Which is where the odd internals of this box must come in (the random shapes of copper which bridge connections). From what I can see, it is just asking to create a short circuit so I would (as I said at the top), bin this connector and wire directly to the motor input wires. Does anyone know how I might go about this? Has anyone had any experience of wiper motor electronics?

I'm hoping that I could just wire 12v to the red wire, earth to the blue and switch 12v to the yellow (it would be lovely if it was this easy!)

I'm betting its not though. Any advice?? I think the motor is the same as Chim, Griff, maybe S and wedge as well?

Edit: The motor looks very much like this one!

Edited by 450Nick on Sunday 15th November 10:08

Edited by 450Nick on Monday 16th November 00:34

[450Nick]

Ah, further research has revealed that it is a Lucas 14w motor, but still not found any info on the conector, or where to get a new one, or how to bypass it...!

[Ant.]

Nick, a bit of info on SVC....Section 6 talks about the switch.


http://www.s-v-c.co.uk/prod_wipers.html#techie

[spend]

Do you really want parking (& intermittent on a racer)? I'd just wire straight into the wiper motor spades!

[GreenV8S]

spend said:

Do you really want parking (& intermittent on a racer)? I'd just wire straight into the wiper motor spades!

Me too, although I suppose self-parking might be handy.

On a road car what I'd expect to find is a switched supply to the motor, and a permanent supply to an internal parking switch and on to the motor. For multiple speeds I'd expect separate switched supplies but they'd probably all use the same parking circuit. Any intermittent stuff I'd expect to be controlled separately and just pulse the switched supply to trigger each wipe. So the plug terminals are pretty much what you'd expect, and now you just need to follow through the internals to see how they connect to the motor. If on doubt, bypass the lot and go straight to the motor as Spend says.