Windscreen wipers struggle to move. Troubleshooting?

[v1nny]

Hi all, found out today that my parents' V-reg K11 wipers struggle to move. You just gear this crunching or grinding noise. It's not the blades as I took them off and the arms barely moves. I took off the caps covering the nuts, and cleaned around there with some APC as it was gunked up, but this also made no difference.

My next thing to try when I pop around again in a few days, is to remove the whole arm and then spray some WD40 or lithium grease to any joints I can see. I've had a look on YouTube and some videos suggest it's either the linkage or motor seizing up. Has anyone experienced this before, and can advise what else I can try myself? The MOT is due in just over a month, and I'm sure that is a fail. As we live in London, we are also looking to replace the car within the next 12 months due to ULEZ, so we would prefer to not have to pay much for it to be repaired.

Here's a video: https://streamable.com/4eupvr.

Thanks for reading and many thanks in advance!

 

[richardwbb]

Those joints that hold the wiper arms are a weak spot on a k11. But the sound it makes doesn't tell me it are those. Still I replaced my own (those nuts might break the bolts or worse make it loose since it is metal bedded in plastic) and then the arms that run the wiper motor (those joints are plastic running metal knobs so wears big time). Sounds like a wiper motor though but I never saw that happen. I can say a lot of sillicone helps greatly on noisy moving wiper parts, just can't tell for how long I did that recently.