Flat Wiper Blades- All Show Or Do They Offer Genuine Useful Benefits
Flat wiper blades are currently well recognised as the an indepensible accessory to complete any car personalisation assignment. Of course, just as many motorists buy them for their modern image as for their aerodynamic attributes.
Originally Flat wiper blades were only available as original equipment on more expensive cars. This meant that if you weren’t lucky enough to drive a new car with Flat wiper blades as original equipment, then there was nothing short of a big engineering project that you could do to update your car to the new flat wiper blade look.
There was then, and still is now, a bit of a sting in the tail for those motorists lucky enough to drive a car with Original Fit Flat Blade Wipers. Because the connectors are patented, there’s very little or no competition at all when it comes to choosing replacements. Therefore, the prices can be exorbitant to say the least.
Recently, however, a few manufacturers have introduced Retrofit Flat wiper blades. These fit virtually any car made in the last thirty years, except sadly, those cars equipped with Flat wiper blades as Original equipment. For those unfortunate owners, sky high prices remain the norm for the moment.
In addition to their looks and aerodynamic advantages, Flat wiper blades have another great advantage over Standard Wiper blades. That is that they are designed and constructed to be jointless. Standard Wiper blades have a multi piece metal frame, and all the sections are joined together by joints with pins or rivets. This is the weakest point of quality Standard Windscreen wipers.
With hot conditions the joints expand and loosen, so allowing the rivet or pin to move and chatter inside the joint. In the immediate term this causes the Windscreen wipers to chatter and judder and wipe unevenly. In the medium to long term, the effect of the rivet or pin rattling around in the joint is to create wear, so that, as the joint cools down, it is still loose and chattering, and so the wear accelerates until finally the wiper blade is chattering at all temperatures and needs to be replaced.
At the other extreme, very cold conditions make the joints shrink and tighten. This makes the wiper blade frame stiffen, so it can’t flex to follow the windscreen shape, and in the longer term causes the metal parts to grind into each other and wear each other down. This time the wear only makes itself apparent when the wiper blade warms up a little, when the symptoms are exactly the same as those created by chattering in hot weather.
The One Piece construction of Flat wiper blades doesn’t just look great, it means that they don’t suffer from any of these problems, so they are ideal for use even in extreme situations.