The latest hummingbird drama is that as suspected, Mom Bird made her nest too small and one of the kids got squeezed out. The danger was that he’d fall, and the irony is that the strong spider web pinning him so he couldn’t eat was removed, he did in fact topple out. Fortunately I happened to be checking on them and caught him before he hit the ground – time for another nest upgrade. As of today things seem okay but the one baby is pretty fussy and just like a child, doesn’t know when to sit still. They’re just barely starting to open their eyes so maybe they’ll see it’s not so wise to play around near the edges of cliffs. For now they’re sitting side by side again so at least he’s got a second chance.
On the other side of the house, Mom Sparrow took over the nest in the rain gutter. Can’t be sure how many babies are there but there were five eggs and it at least looks like her nest is large enough.
On the car, I honestly didn’t plan to have wipers, being willing to risk it and assume that cops would be distracted by other things to notice their absence. However, most builders will need them and I would like the option of driving cross-country, and getting caught by the rain is an eventual certainty (it actually happened in Kimini.) Plus, back before I had second thoughts, a wiper setup was ordered so it was already on-hand. For those reasons it seemed reasonable to see how bad installing them would be.
Turns out that it wasn’t too bad, more like a big puzzle finding the magic location for sweep angle and keeping the blades clear of the edges of the glass. The driver’s-side mount is pictured, a simple bracket to hold the actuator just so. Still haven’t finalized the location of the passenger-side arm because it’s an “also-there” sort of thing since the driver’s wiper is most important. As long as the sweep angle is the same between the two it probably doesn’t have to be powered up now, which is fine with me; there’s other stuff to be working on at this point. One annoyance is that due to the size and angle of the glass, and shape of the cowl, it means that the blade pivots cannot be located such that the blades can lay down out of the way (parallel to the bottom of the glass.) Either they’re going to be way up high as-shown, or at about a 30-deg angle. That’s better but not great; the blades may just be left off and kept in the storage area for when it looks like rain. The wiper motor will be in the forward storage area to keep it out of the dash area and to maintain space for a glovebox of sorts.