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One of my pet peeves about windshield wipers, is there are always those sections of the windshield they do not get to:
1) The top center, top left, and top right of the windshield
2) The bottom center of the windshield
Those parts always get dirty and you can't clean them except by hand.
I propose
a full-length windshield wiper that would cover the enitre area in one full sweep from left to right. It wouldn't be a semi-circle wipe, but a straight-across motion.
There could even be two of them that start in the center of the window and move oppositely from each other. When they are not being used they would be retracted under the hood of the vehicle instead of lying on the window.
[link]
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Encumbered as I am with an inability to think beyond prosaic mechanical versions of human activities, I should imagine that such a single sweep would have to be carried out by a carside mounted spindly human arm mechanism, which alternately sweeps your windscreen clean and asks you for a quid. |
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I think that the double wiper notion (a) increased mechanical complexity unecessarily and (b) would lead to the creation of a spine of dirt in the middle of your windscreen which would probably annoy you by means of making it look like you were reading a book, a picture book of roads. |
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I imagine that using a horizontal worm gear laid across the bottom of the windshield with a vertically mounted standard wiper blade that travels on a parallel greased top support bar would be the most efficient way to make this. But I doubt that you could make it traverse and reverse quickly enough to keep up with even moderate rainfall. |
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MB300E. The S320/420/500s have a cam driven pair of wipers. |
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I am aware of the single wiper blade on a Mercedes, however, it is still a semi-circular wiping pattern being used to cover a square surface. |
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The MB wiping pattern isn't at all semi circular as it parallels, with quite good fidelity, the perimeter of windshield. It one wanted to, the design could easily be altered to exactly cover the entire windshield by mapping the eccentricity of the cam more closely to the windshield edge and, for added precision, but likely fragile over time, attaching the end of the arm to a track at the edge of the windshield. The largest drawbacks to the system are the rumble of the arm tracking the cam surface and the large amount of torque required to extend the arm spring as the follower makes its way up and over the lobes. Overall, I think the system both ingenious and elegant. |
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