Flat Wiper Blades- All Show Or Do They Provide Genuine Useful Advantages

Flat Blade Wipers are now well acknowledged as a must have accessory to complete any vehicle personalisation assignment. Of course, just as many vehicle owners buy them for their modern image as for their aerodynamic attributes.

Initially Flat Blade Wipers were only available as original equipment on more expensive cars. This meant that if you weren’t fortunate enough to have a new car with Flat Blade Wipers as original equipment, then there was nothing short of a big engineering project that you could do to modernise 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 vehicle owners fortunate enough to have a car with Original Fit Flat wiper blades. Because the connectors are patented, there’s very little or no competition at all when it comes to buying replacements. Therefore, the prices can be exorbitant to say the least.

Recently, however, lots of manufacturers have brought in Retrofit Flat Blade Wipers. These fit virtually any car made in the last 30 years, except unfortunately, those vehicles equipped with Flat Blade Wipers as Original equipment. For those unfortunate owners, sky high prices remain the rule for the moment.

In addition to their looks and aerodynamic advantages, Flat Blade Wipers have another great advantage over Standard Wiper blades. That is that they are designed and constructed to be one-piece. Standard Car wiper blades have a multi section metal frame, and all the pieces are joined together by joints with pins or rivets. This is the weakest point of quality Standard Windscreen wipers.

During hot weather the joints expand and loosen, so permitting the rivet or pin to move and chatter inside the joint. In the immediate term this causes the Windscreen wiper blades 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 stimulate wear, so that, when 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 opposite extreme, very cold weather conditions make the joints shrink and tighten. This makes the wiper blade frame stiffen, so it can’t flex to follow the windscreen curve, and in the longer term causes the metal parts to grind into each other and wear each other down. This time the wear only becomes noticeable 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 Blade Wipers doesn’t just look hot, it means that they don’t suffer from any of these problems, so they are ideal for use even in extreme weather.