A Penny Saved is a Penny Earned

We've been a one vehicle family since pretty early in our marriage. Sometimes it is inconvenient, but we always get by. The vehicle we have now is a 1998 Nissan Pathfinder. Sometimes it is awesome to have on hand. Like yesterday when I used it to pull out the stumps of our bushes left from when we took out the brick planter area. (I knew my dad would have thought it was cool using the truck for that. He liked doing things like that with his truck: pulling things, pulling things out, pulling people out of ditches on the highway on nasty winter days, etc.)

Other days, the truck feels its age. It is getting a bit tired. Friday Jean called me at work to tell me the windshield wipers weren't working. She and the kids came and picked me up from work, then we picked up a pizza on the way home. The kids and ran in and got the pizza, and Jean drove us home. On the way home it started to rain. Then, it rained hard. I reached my hand out the window and grabbed the wipers and moved them rapidly back and forth so that Jean could see. You could hear the wiper motor working, so that couldn't be the problem. It was like something just came off.

Saturday I was determined to fix it. No way in heck am I taking it to the repair shop without at least giving it the old college try. So. I took the weather stripping for the grill area and the grill area itself under the exterior of the windshield. I also had to take off one metal plate underneath that. Interesting. Let's keep going. There was this metal bar that runs from the wipe motor to another bar that moved the wipers. The metal bar was supposed to be attached to a rubber boot, which went over a ball looking thing. This boot had a sticky substance on it which made it adhere to the metal bar. The substance had lost just enough of its stickiness to allow the bar to pull away from the boot. I took some exterior strength silicone and placed it on the boot and the bar hoping it would readhere them to each other. I put everthing back together and let the silicone cure. I wanted to give it 24 hours of cure time. We'll see soon if the silicone will take the stress of adhereing a rubber boot to a metal rod. I hope so. It is going to be another rainy day.