Windshield Wiper Blade Replacements

When I was a kid they sold windshield wiper refills at gas stations and it seems like they were pretty cheap. But once I actually had my own car, you had to replace the whole wiper. If you did a little shopping you could still get them for a somewhat reasonable price of maybe $3-$5 each (honestly the cheapest ones never seemed to last very long). I had Honda Civics and then the Mazda3 which both had a U bend at the end of the cars windshield arm and it was pretty easy attaching the new off-brand ones to that, though it bothered me to throw away most of the assembly. Now I have a 2020 Ford Escape. After 3 years, the blades weren’t working well anymore so I went to Walmart to get new ones and they were out of one size I needed, so I bought one and then a month or two later they had the other one in stock and I bought it, though I was a little nervous I was buying the same size I already had. Ultimately it didn’t matter because neither would attach to my car. Instead of a U, there was a pinch connector attachment that Ford uses and nobody sells for anything reasonable. If you go to the dealer, they want like $70 for a new pair of wipers, which is insane. You can look around and maybe find some for more like $50, which is still insane. To make it more complicated, Ford has attached aerodynamic vanes to the wipers which means you can buy wipers with the vanes pointing the wrong, unaerodynamic, direction if you aren’t careful (though it seems like all wipers go up and to the left; maybe in British countries they go the other way).

I looked around for wipers where you could just replace the rubber blade. I found one company that would sell you a new wiper and that wiper would take blade refills, but you still had to shell out a lot for their wipers the first time (and the replacements weren’t cheap). I wondered if you could get a mechanic to just replace the Ford arms with arms that had a more standard U end, but that seemed doubtful. Amazon has just the rubber blade part, but there are a lot of different sizes and cross-sectional shapes. The basic measurement is the width of the flat back end of the blade. I was able to pull the blade out of one of my wipers and measured 5 mm, which again doesn’t seem very standard, but I did find one company that sold 5 mm blade refills and the shape seemed like it might work. In the picture above, the new blade is on the left and the old one is on the right.

They arrived today and I installed them. The shape isn’t exactly the same, so they were harder to slide into the groove, but not too bad. I got two pairs for $13 (still too much for just 4 strips of rubber) and you cut them to length with scissors. If each pair lasts a year, then that will get me to 5 years, half the expected time I will have the car, and then maybe I can buy new wipers since they are definitely showing wear from the sun and use. I haven’t actually tested them in the rain yet, so we will see how that goes.