Changing Wiper Blades, the Dummies Version

Typical wiper blade installation with J hook

Our older staffers have been known to lament the difficulty of performing one's own maintenance on modern cars. In olden days, you could change the oil and filter, plugs and points, and air filter all by your lonesome on a summer afternoon. Nowadays you have to be double-jointed to get the oil filter off, and in some cars have to damned near pull the engine to get to one of the spark plugs. You can, however, still change windshield wipers... unless you're as Clueless as Heath Wright appears to be, based on his ItStillRuns.com post, "How to Replace Rear Wiper Blades."

Up front: you change a rear wiper blade the same way you change a front wiper blade. You remove the old blade, which is usually held on by a spring clip and a J hook, and slide a new one into place. Sometimes there's a pin instead of a spring clip, but all in all, it ain't rocket science.
It also ain't what Wright would have you do. For starters, Heath wants you to...

"Lift the plastic cap off the rear wiper blade. Unscrew the 13 mm screws with the flat-head screwdriver. Lift the wiper arm off the windshield and the plastic cover underneath the arm. Unscrew the 22 mm screws and then take off the wiper off. Go inside the car and into the back seat..."

Wait, what? plastic caps? 13mm screws? 22mm screws? WTF is this moron talking about, anyway?

It seems that Heath wandered onto the blog of some incompetent by the handle of "dharrison," and conflated a set of instructions for pulling the wiper motor with changing the blades. We'd know more, but d's little website is long dead and was never fully archived. What a bummer.
We're pretty certain that Wright's instructions aren't going to be of much use to anyone hoping to install a new wiper blade on the rear of an SUV. We also aren't quite certain where anyone's going to get (much less use!) a "22 mm spanner" in the process of changing wiper blades. Heck, we aren't even sure where one would use that "22 mm spanner" while replacing the wiper motor!

Clearly, those are the sort of Dumbass of the Day instructions you can expect if you depend on a theater major to tell you how to work on a car...

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