We have a list of to-dos on a 330GT we have at the shop, and one of them was to fix the wiper motor.

Wiper motors on a classic car are often times problematic because most vintage car owners rarely drive their cars in the rain, but when they’re called into action, the inactivity of the motor can come back to bite you!

This wiper motor was not moving with the switch, and the first task was to see if the motor was working. Our electrical guru inspected the motor, and pronounced the inner workings fine, so the next step as to see if it was plugged in correctly.

I was given this diagram from a Lucas manual that supposedly showed the way the wiper motor should be wired into various wiper motors and switches. The only problem was the colors on the wiper motor was so faded that there was no way to tell what went where! With this diagram, we had to trace them through the motor to identify each color and label them. With the motor harness labelled, we turned our attention to the switch.

We traced each wire and found several problems. Lucas wiper switches require a ground wire, and this one was missing or disconnected. The next problems were we were only able to get one speed to operate, and the park feature wasn’t working. It took several tries, and head scratching to figure out what was wrong, and we finally found the wiring diagram wasn’t 100% accurate!

At the end of the day we were relieved we figured out the assortments of problems, but spent most of the day cursing the logic of the engineers who worked at Lucas LTD back in the 60s!