Rip-off Britain (wipers for a Galaxy)

Qurstion - aren't the Shahalambraxy wipers big 22 or 24" curved ones?

Please tell me where you got aftermarket curved blades, can't find one for my S60 (24 straight + 22 curved) anywhere (except, of course, Volvo)

Yes, curved and a whopping 70cm - or 27.5" in old money.

They are actually straight but they work just fine - maybe the nylon backing helps. If they wear out sooner by not being curved I'm still quids-in. My annual mileage is low anyway.

I agree. If people will pay it, someone will charge it, but not just in Britain.

Driving through Italy, during very heavy rain, I stopped for petrol. The garage looked at my wiper blades (which were fine) and suggested that they needed replacing. I conceded that I was having problems with the wipers. The passenger side linkage had come undone. Knowing this could only be fixed in a dry garage with a spare hour or two, I asked him to look at it. Of course he couldn't fix it.

This was certainly a rip off as the garage was ready to blame perfectly good wipers rather than the heavy rain for poor visibility.

Intermittent wipers solves that one. I've not heard a squeaky blade for years.

Perhaps it's the London atmosphere, then. Both my cars have, of course, intermittent action and both will have juddering blades eventually. That's the clue to replace them.

Dave Plowman mumbled:

Car in Hounslow have a voracious appetite for wipers...I always put it down to a fine drizzle of unburnt aviation fuel from the jets.

I find I have to clean the windscreen and wipers with tissue paper and water if I don't want them to judder / squeak / leave streaks. Might have something to do with the windscreen once having RainX on it. Won't bother with that again.

In message , Guy King writes

Nah, modern jets are very efficient at burning fuel.

The other cleaning trick that seems to work (and also gets car wax off a windscreen) is to use newspaper instead of a cloth. (Something in the ink?)

Paul Giverin mumbled:

Not on take-off they're not...you can see the soot pouring out the back. That and of course, once in a blue moon they dump fuel.

/flippant/ But they're running rich when cold!

And they also dump fuel.

"Tim S Kemp" mumbled:

With a flight a minute for 16 hours a day, there's bound to be one of them along sooner or later!

In message , DervMan writes

Fraid not :)

Dumping fuel is dumping money. It rarely happens on civil aircraft. They tend to burn it off in an emergency rather than dump it.

Paul Giverin mumbled:

Still shows incomplete combustion though.

Seriously, Paul, if you'd lived near Heathrow on the glide path you'd know that on some days you can smell the fuel in the air and that cars get a greasy soil on them very quickly...far more than in similarly built up areas of London.

Trust me, if they need to shed fuel for an immediate landing then they dump it, there was a recent (ish) case of a lot of compensation because a commercial jock dropped his fuel low over some industrial estates in Manchester and it damaged the roofs of buildings.