No updates to this blog in a good few months! — This must be a good thing, right?
The rear wiper motor is used to turn the arm on your car’s rear window wipers. Since it is typically not used as often as the front windshield wiper, it receives a lot less wear and tear and is less likely to need replacing. However, when it does need replacing, it often gets neglected. DIY rear wiper repair guide on a BMW E46 Compact. Plastic gear: M6 90 deg fitting nozzle: BimmerZen assumes no li.
Anyway, recently I’ve found that my rear wiper has began to “not work”. When I Google for non-working E46 Touring rear wipers, the usual results is an electrical issue, but mine was different. It did work… Or should I say, tries to work. Its just very very stiff.
Opening the rear tailgate and moving the wiper by hand takes quite a bit of effort, which is obviously not right. Luckily I found this brilliant thread over on BimmerForums which explains in detail basically what I’ve just done to fix this issue.
However, I did take a slightly different approach in one area of that guide…
Firstly started off with taking a photo before I began, just for reference more than anything! Tailgate open, wiper in parked position & very stiff
Going by that guide, I got all the way to Step 8 before I encountered a problem. My wiper arm pivot entire assembly was stuck in the glass. Really badly. I was almost going to give up on it, but then fast forward to Step 12 on the guide shows removing the shaft from the assembly itself. I thought that could be worth a shot, but doing in-situ.
Which is exactly what I did. Very carefully removing the C-clip, then using molegrips to wiggle the wiper shaft back & forth while pushing from above. After a good few minutes of struggle, it eventually worked.
With the shaft out, I grabbed some emery cloth & cleaned it up a bit.
The other side of the glass, by the way, looks like this with the shaft removed.
I then applied a ton of grease & re-fitted it. Instantly it felt better. From the struggle I had removing it, I was worried I wouldn’t be able to get it back in, but it EASILY slid right in, and I could wiggle it back & forth easily by hand now. Much better!
I re-fit everything & tested the wiper. Absolutely spot on. Of course, I didn’t finish the job without cleaning all the WD40, grease & finger-prints off the glass.
Job done.
Cost = zero.
Time = 45 minutes.
Sweet!
I decided to finally – FINALLY – to buy myself the head unit I’ve wanted since I’ve owned this car. Now I have it, I really don’t know why it took me so long to decide to get it. Either way, its here now and I don’t regret a thing — its incredible!
The unit I went for was bought from eBay by a seller “Audio Visual Tech”, its the Xtrons PA7746BP, which is a 7″ Android 7.1 unit. From what I can tell, these “style” of head units are much of the same from multiple manufactures – I believe they’re all made by the same company, but re-branded slightly.
Anyway, on with installing. There are tons of guides online for this (and on YouTube) so I won’t bore you with the entire process, but generally I find it super easy. Within 20 minutes tops, the head unit was in & working.
One of the things I’ve read about a lot was the lower climate control HVAC unit needing to be relocated. That’s fine – and very easy – but some say it requires the special relocation bracket to get it fitted perfectly – which is expensive! (Over £75, if not more at time of writing this). This was the route I was going to go down (and still might), but I’ve actually found a way around this.
As reported by many online forum threads, there is indeed a gap at the bottom of the climate control unit when pushed all the way in. On top of that, its quite “loose” when pushed all the way in, and not quite horizontal either.
To combat this, I’ve actually installed mine without it pushed all the way back, and to hold it in place a small piece of MDF painted black in order to fix it in place. Its not completely solid, and pushing from the back of the unit will make it pop out, but its certainly fixed in place enough whereby it doesn’t move during driving or when pushing buttons on the unit itself.
It also doesn’t look too bad? The gap is still present, but its now at the top rather than the bottom, thus less visible.
At night, the unit looks super cool. Although I did find the display maybe just a touch too bright when on completely black roads
The built in EQ is very cool and effective too
I then proceeded to do a lot more research into “modding” these head units. It seems there are multiple avenue’s to go down. I’m not familiar with Android AT ALL, but within 24 hours I’ve managed to install & customise a “launcher” called CarWebGuru that completely transforms the head unit.
The launcher is basically how the device looks when the Home button is pressed. It’s fairly essential to make this Home screen as easy as possible to navigate around, and after a lot of searching & playing, CarWebGuru’s launcher seems the best suited for me.
Here’s how mine looks after 20 minutes of playing around & customisation;
Fast forward to this morning and my Xtrons reverse camera also arrived. I thought this would be a nightmare to install as well, but looking back it actually wasn’t too bad. I decided to install the camera on the numberplate light plinth. Removing this was easy with x4 torx bolts
I unclipped the connector on the other side and set to work mounting the camera on its own little bracket that it came with
And here’s it is in place mounted back to the car;
Bmw E46 Rear Wiper Not Working Remotely
The wire for it is fed through one of the existing number plate light holes – yes, there is enough room, just about. The wire then runs up the drivers-side tailgate and jumps into the grommet with all the other wires that live there.
From there, its inside the car, so its relatively easy after this point. It runs down the D pillar, under the boot floor, under the rear seats, under the plastic trims alongside the bottom of the door steps, and below the steering wheel. The cable provided is JUST long enough to reach!
Bmw E46 Rear Window Wiper Not Working
And once done, and wired up according to the instructions, the camera activates when changing gear into reverse. It does this by the fact the camera is powered off of the reverse lights, very clever.
On top of that, the camera I bought has 4 small LED lights. I’m not sure how good they’ll be at night though.
Overall, very pleased with the head unit. Should have bought it sooner! Its transformed the car 🙂