Windshield wiper installation: 2000 SL2

Greetings all.

I just purchased a pair of TripleEdge windshield wipers to prepare my

2000 SL2 for winter. The wipers I have now are starting to smear a bit in rain; don't want to take a chance what they'll do in snow or ice. (I live in northeaster PA; fair amount of frozen precip most winters.)

My problem is there are no clear instruction in re installing the wipers either on the package surrounding the wipers or in the Owner's Guide.

First, I got the 22" blade for the driver's side and the 20" blade for the passenger side, as per the spec book at the store where I purchased them. The Saturn owner's manual says 21.5" for the driver's side. Is that a problem? If so, I'm not sure what the answer is, since there were no half-inch increments available in the wipers I looked at.

Next, can anyone provide the Idiot's Guide version to changing the wipers without causing damage to the mechanism. I hate like hell to pay a mechanic to do it, but I don't want to try it myself without some kind of guide or instructions.

Please forgive this request from a non-car guy, at least by the standards of automotive newsgroups. Also, speaking of winter, does anyone here recommend using Rain-Ex or one of the other windshieild-coating solutions for winter driving? I've never done it, but I know people who swear by it and tell me I should try it.

TIA, Eric M

Reply to
Eric Mark
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Reply to
teem

...Saturn used to replace just the blades on my 97 (not the whole arm) about once a year, when I'd remember to ask when getting the oil changed. I think it was like maybe $15 for both installed and seemed like a good value...

Reply to
Jonnie Santos

It may be easier to just change the rubber part. ANCO makes ones that fit oem with relatively easy to follow pictures on how to remove the old rubber and install new. I've done it on 2 cars and it was easy (though neither was a saturn)

Reply to
Art

Thanks for the advice, but I had the TripleEdge blades installed by a mechanic yesterday when I took the car in for inspection and snow tires. (Turned out I needed new front brakes too. Christmas shopping will be kinda lean this year.)

They offered to install them for free, since they were doing so much other work on the car.

Changing the rubber or whatever exactly is in the innards of the blade arms would have been the next step. It was getting pretty bad. I held out for the TripleEdge blades, though, because I've heard glowing reports of their performance in winter.

Last winter---my first with the 2000 SL2---my biggest problem was the windshield smearing and fogging up when I ran the wipers constantly. I drove back from Ohio to eastern PA in a near-blizzard around the end of January. The road conditions were bad, but I'm used to that, and the car handled fairly well, even without winter tires.

What finally caused me to pull off I-80 and spend the night in a hotel was that I could at times barely see out the windshield. I tried all settings of the heater, defogger and defroster, with and without the recirculation button activated. (Later I saw the owner's manual recommends not to use recirculation in winter; in my case nothing I did seemed to help much.)

We'll see how it goes. Thanks again to all who shared their knowledge and advice.

Regards,

Eric M

Reply to
Eric Mark

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