A respray of our windshield wiper arms

Here is another post as a relation to making the wiper arm area look clean – just like our previous post about Wiper Arm Cowel Restoration.

Anyone who has owned a Honda, Acura, or pretty much an car will know after many years of driving – the wiper arms get destroyed! Leaving a nice flashy mix of black wiper arm and pure metal exposed! Nothing makes your car look older than mismatched trim or chunks of paint missing. Look how bad my wiper had gotten on my Acura Integra. The paint has peeled right off in huge sections – almost half the wiper is shiny metal versus the original OEM black that it should be.

My weapon of choice was a flag black paint to match the existing texture of black on my wiper arms. Here is the product I used from Duplicolor:

Taking off the wipers on any Honda/Acura including my Integra is fairly easy. When you take a look, you will see two 14mm nuts that are actually holding on the Wipers right at the base of the Wiper Arms. After removing the two nuts, you simply pry off the wiper arm slowly. They may be a little tight if it is the first time they are taken off (mine were!), but they will come off.

Both wipers are now off the car – on a sheet ready to get the repair treatment:

Before painting what you will need to do is give it a light sanding. This will give the paint something to bite into and promote adhesion between the paint and the metal. The grit I used was 320 because it was what I had laying around.

When you have scuffed up the surface to be painted, you need to remove and loose sanding dust particles. If you leave them on you will be doing all the work for not. You can use a soapy water to do it and is what I used here. Ultimately you will want to use a tack cloth to actually remove all dust. But that is a bit pricier – and for me wiper arms will eventually have this happen again.

Next step is to simply apply a coat of paint! Do it light and do it in multiple coats. Let’s see the first coat of paint on my Wiper Arms:

The can instructed to wait 10 minutes between application of coats. I followed the instructions and did 3 light coats of paint. Let’s see after the final coat how it looks:

I let it dry for about an hour in the sun before handling the wipers. Wanted to make sure I didn’t ruin what I had just done! Then I installed them back onto the car using the reverse of how I took them off. You may need to do it a couple times if you find you have not aligned them properly to where they were before. Here are the results:

The wiper arms look like new and the car looks just that much better now! Great job for a quick can of paint and an hour or so.