Ananasfreak

It’s always with a mixture of amusement and concern that I watch thousands of Brits setting off every year for their annual skiing holiday. A few of them will have Snow Chains in the boot, very few of them will have fitted winter tyres, and just about none of them will have Wiper Blades capable of withstanding and operating in alpine winter weather.

It seems to be rather the same with organisers and participants in extreme trekking adventures. To be reasonable, most of these guys will have invested in a robust 4×4 car, and equipped it with tyres suited to the terrain, according to whether they’re travelling into Arctic, Tropical or desert environmanets. They’ll have bought and added all kinds of survival kit such as winches, extra fuel & water capacity etc, but as usual the good old Wiper Blades will have been well and truly forgotten or at least taken for granted.

If you’re driving big distances in extreme conditions or in remote parts of the world, good vision is fundamental, especially at night, when the wild life start to come out. These can be a problem even in deceptively urban looking areas of Scandinavia where Moose stray quite freely. These animals are dark coloured, totally ignorant of traffic dangers, weigh up to a ton and a half, and carry the bulk of their mass right at car windscreen height.

To see and avoid these and other dangers, it’s extremely important to have excellent lighting and High Performance Wiper Blades.

But what are High Performance Wiper Blades and how can you choose them? Well, first it’s probably best to identify what are normal Wiper Blades.

Normal standard Wiper Blades have metal frames with 4, 6 or 8 legs. Each leg has a foot at the end which holds the rubber blade in place. The major problems with this type of wiperblade are:-

The pressure holding the Wiper Blades onto the screen is irregular, with each foot making a high pressure point. This leads to irregular wear & thus poor wiping. The joints in the metal frame are subjected to the stresses of expansion & contraction as the temperatures vary. In extremes this causes seizing or wear of the joints, which in turn causes juddering and poor wiping. The joints are also vulnerable to dust and sand attack in desert or arid areas.

Finally, the rubber blade itself is affexted by Ultra-Violet, Ozone, Pollution and the chemicals used to stop the Screenwash Freezing. It also goes brittle in sub zero conditions, and so can’t flex to follow the windscreen shape and thus ensure a clean wipe.

Some manufacturers take a traditional wiperblade frame, and fit it with a silicone blade. They like to call these High Performance Wiper Blades, because the blade itself can endure temperatures down to -60°C whilst remaining flexible, and temperatures up to 200°C without softening or degrading. On top of that the silicone blade is resistant to Ultra-Violet, Ozone, Solvents etc. However such a wiperblade still suffers the disadvantages of the jointed metal frame.

Others offer the new Flat Wiper Blades as their High Performance Wiper Blades. This overcomes the problems of the traditional jointed Wiperblade frame, but if it has a rubber blade, it will still suffer from the disadvantages of operating temperature and susceptibility to environmental and solvent attack.

So the ultimate High Performance Wiper Blades are Silicone bladed Flat Blade Wipers, because its blade operates perfectly between -60°C and +200°C, and it shrugs off environmental & solvent attack. On top of that, the frame itself has no joints to seize or wear, and applies the pressure consistently along the length of the blade.

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