Replacing an Air Wiper Motor with an inexpensive Electric motor.

[peterbylt]

The Driver's side Air wiper on our MCI 96A3 never worked correctly, I had rebuilt it and replaced the switch, it only worked on occasion, some of the parts had deteriorated that weren't in the rebuild kit and I was looking at sourcing an expensive air motor.
 
I found a few air to electric conversion kits that were over a $1000, I also looked at getting the parts from a newer MCI bus.

I found this YouTube with a wiring diagram and a wiper motor and parts list under $100 and ordered all the parts, the wiper motor is from a 95 Jeep wrangler.

After receiving all the parts from Amazon the next day and removing the front trim pieces, I pulled the wiper motor assembly from the front of the coach.

I didn't want to permanently alter any of the original parts in case this experiment failed so I could go back to the original configuration if necessary.

Peter

[peterbylt]

First I removed the air motor from the mounting plate, then played around with the new motor and a few spacers to see if I could use the original internal arms and mechanism.
The issue being the air motor uses a side to side motion and the electric motor uses a rotating arm.

Using pieces of scrap from the shop I made an aluminum mounting plate that I was able to mount 1.5 inches above the original motor mounting plate, using the four air motor mounting holes, four 2 inch bolts and four 1.5 inch pieces of PVC pipe as spacers, eventually I will replace the PVC spacers with some coupling nuts.

I mounted the electric motor with the drive shaft in the same position as the air motor, with the spacers for height this placed the swing arm of the new motor in the right plane for the original linkage to attach directly to the pin on the motors swing arm, although rounded it fit perfectly into the original linkage arm's brass bushing and locked in place with a C-clip.

After some experimentation I determined the swing arm on the motor needed to be lengthened by 3/8 inch to get enough swing on the wiper, I cut the swing arm and welded in a 3/8 inch spacer, I should have and still want to extend this to probably 5/8 inch for a more complete windshield coverage.

I wired it using the YouTube video, the switch fit in the original air wiper switch position without issue.

The passenger side air motor still works without issue and I will be leaving that for now and may replace it in the future depending on how the electric motor works out.

I will also be researching intermittent wiper controls for the electric motor.

I have not driven it in the rain yet, but it worked really well in the driveway under the full force of the hose.

I will update after I have had the opportunity to drive it in the rain.
 
I am quite happy with how this project turned out.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Peter

[dtcerrato]

Great write up and photo/videos.
Thanks & nice work.

[KF6-BusFan]

Most excellent! Wiper repair is near the top of my to-do list and this really moves it into "I have a plan" territory. Thanks.

[luvrbus]

That is neat, I have saw people here at the shop buy the Dilomber brand motors from Amazon for 50 bucks a few years ago and replace the air motors, the swing was adjustable on those but I don't what model number they used now