Windshield Wipers clogged with ice

In that case I guess your only real option is to make a tool to thump the wiper arm with. I highly advise against reaching out with your bare hand and grabbing your wiper blade though. I’ve snapped mine off several times in the past doing that. And then your wiper is broke off completely and you’re really screwed. I’ve tried to add oily substances to the covering on the winter blades and it seems to work but only for a short time. As far as the coil of metal brke tubing, I just get a section of it wrap it around a soup can to make a nice coil and then attach it to the engine block underneath the exhaust manifold behind the turbo charger. It’s nice and hot back there on this caterpillar. With some tinkering you can find a good hotspot to put your heat exchanger. Then just run the ends of the brake tubing up to where the washer lines feed the wipers and splice it in. Can be removed in minutes if you’re concerned about it being seen by a mechanic.

 

A temp solution would be to tape cardboard over the defrost vents to direct that hot air right where the wipers rest

 

My old Western Star had thee worst defroster.

Anything under 20 degrees and the side windows would totally frost over and freeze shut.

So it was a battle to pick what view you valued most or ride around with the windows down.

Solved the problem by buying 4 of those Turbo fans from Flying J and running them with the windows cracked a bit.

Rigged up one blasting each side window and one blasting each half of the windshield.

I bought a 4 outlet plug and double face taped it where I could switch all of them off . Tucked all the wiring up nice and clean.


Now the wipers icing over was not soo much of a problem because like I said the defroster was like a mouse fart.

 

Get a set of PIAA silcon wipers with plastic frames. I've had mine for about two and a half years and I've never had a freeze up lift the wiper off the windshield since.

they sell them on Amazon they're two or three times the cost of a regular set of wipers but will outlast a regular set by much more than two or three times

 

The best thing I have found to avoid frozen wipers is to stay below I20 between October and March.

 

The best solution, for US heavy truck manufacturers to follow the lead of the European truck manufacturers, every one of them offer a "winter or cold weather" package. From reading some of these packages, typically they include: heated windshields, heated washer fluid, some include heated wipers. But no, US truck manufacturers are still stuck building us trucks from the 80's with minimal safety features (and I'm not talking about collision avoidance systems).

 

I want the electrically heated windshield I think Ford offered on several models a few years ago. I think the Astrovan and maybe the Crown Victoria had these.

 

It

It's standard equipment on some land rover and Jaguar models, optional on other models, same with Volvo cars. Mercedes used to offer a heated washer bottle, but they discontinued it.

 

With all that heat coming from the engine and somehow nobody ever thought about mounting the washer liquid near it, or even have a heatpipe around the washer fluid tank.

Mine usually freezes up under 25 degrees despite the bottle stating that the windshield washer liquid is this extremely hardcore mixture that is good down to -30 or something. WTF?

 

Do you use the hardcore stuff year round, or do you use the regular non-winter stuff during other seasons? If you use the non-winter stuff, it's still always in the tank, we only use winter mix year round, most of us carry 2 or 3 bottle all the time, every winter the company buys a pallet full from a local manufacturer.