Re: 85 Turbo Wagon

Following the excellent advice of Mac_Muz (and no other party :), I located the wiper relays under the floor mat. I am still at a loss to understand WHY they are hidden there...

By disconnecting first one, and then the other of the two relays, I determined which was for the front wiper. I opened the relay box, expecting to find some burned contacts, but everything was pristine. By experimenting, I think I determined that this relay is only concerned with parking the blades and with the intermittent wiper function. I could be wrong.

Back to the stalk switch, I used my Bentley book to determine the color coding for the washer wire (blue/yellow). When I touched a hot wire to that wire, the washer worked, so it appears that the problem is in the stalk switch itself.

I have cleaned the contacts on my power window switches more than once. So my next thought was to dismantle the stalk switch assembly and clean the contacts inside it. Alas, it is riveted together. But it looks as though one might VERY carefully drill out the two rivets in order to gain access to the interior of the switch, and then perhaps replace the rivets with a couple of very tiny self tapping screws. Has anyone ever tried this?

The othe option, of course is to pay Volvo for a new $talk $witch :(

In the meantime, I have swapped the plugs on the two washer pumps - I can get fluid to my front windshield that way, but, of course, the rear wiper makes several passes :) C'est la vie :)