Does this sound familiar to any of you? You have an old Studebaker, 
and you'd like to not worry about being caught out in the rain, and/or 
you just want to have windshield wipers on the car to maintain some 
semblance of legality. But, you don't like the look of ugly aftermarket 
wiper blades, so either you kept the original stainless Trico blades 
which amazingly enough are still on the car, or else you went to York or 
Reedsville and bought some used wiper blades from one of the parts 
vendors, figuring you'd put new rubber in them. Unfortunately, finding 
refills of any kind in a parts store is difficult these days. Here's 
what works:

If you have a 63-up Lark or Avanti with the 15" wiper blades, and the 
blades still have the original splines and clips intact, get yourself a 
set of Trico part no. 43-190, 43-200, or 43-220 refills (you probably 
will have to order them.) They are long refills but have a spline 
somewhat similar to the original stainless Trico blades used on our 
cars. (I was hoping that it would be *so* close that it could be cut 
down and modified to work in case you had an original blade with non-
original spline, but no such luck.) I bought some CarQuest 453-190 
refills, which I believe are just a relabel of the Trico 43-190. There 
was a little dot of glue holding the rubber into the spline, I just 
broke that with my thumbnail, pulled the rubber out of the spline, 
and scraped as much as I could off. Then I cut the rubber to length with 
a razor blade (for a 15" blade, looks like it should be somewhere around 
14-5/8" to 14-3/4") removed the original spline from the wiper blade, 
pulled the rubber into the original spline, and reinstalled. Looks close 
enough to original from any farther away than a foot or two to fool 
anyone but a Bloomington Gold show judge, and is the easiest solution 
I've found to keeping your original wiper blades yet.


I suspect but don't have an example handy to test that this will also 
work for the 12" blades used on all 56-62 cars and 63-64 Hawks. This 
would be fantastic if it did as those original Trico blades were never 
intended to be refilled so your only other options are to remove the 
original splines and use a universal plastic spline refill modified to 
fit or else pay $20-something plus S&H for show-correct repro rubber 
inserts from one of the Corvette parts suppliers (what's on my car now, 
but when those wear out...)


For the 15" blades, a Trico 43-150 will fit and function, but the spline 
is not as original and it does bind somewhat as the rubber above the 
spline is a little larger, so I suspect that using the longer refill 
with the correct profile extrusion with the original spline as I have 
described above is preferable, assuming that you still have the original 
spline and clip.


So don't throw out those original wiper blades, shine 'em up and refill 
them. If you see a parts car with original blades, grab 'em! Please 
don't let another nice looking Studebaker fall victim to the Ugly Black 
Wiper Blade syndrome!


good luck

nate   (SDC Forum #41079) - Oct 2010