Tag: Parts

DIY: How to Replace Front and Rear Wiper Blades on Ford Mustang Mach‑E Written Guide with Pictures

writ­ten 7/13/26, updat­ed 7/13/26

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Overview

What

Replacing/changing wiper blades front and rear for a 2023/2024 Ford Mus­tang Mach‑E

Why

Because it’s easy enough to do by your­self to save mon­ey. Plus, you can choose which blades you want!

Materials and Cost

ITEMPRICE
Bosch Icon Beam 24″ & 20″ OE (set of 2)$45.04 (Ama­zon)
Motor­craft Rear Blade 12″ — WW1207A$23.38 (Ford)
Or if you’d like to stick with OEM:
Motor­craft Wiper Blades 24″ - WW2432A
Motor­craft Wiper Blades 20″ — WW2052A		~$23* (Ford)
~$23* (Ford)
*Price depends on loca­tion

Time and Effort

Time: 5–10 min­utes

Dif­fi­cul­ty: Easy

Process

Note: I rec­om­mend hav­ing 1–2 microfiber cloths handy to help clean the wind­shield under the wipers, but also to rest the wiper arm on so it does­n’t crash down onto the wind­shield. Glass clean­er could be help­ful, too

Front

  • The Offi­cial­ly Cor­rect Way: Place Arms in Ser­vice Posi­tion — Accord­ing to the own­er’s man­u­al, place the wipers in the ser­vice posi­tion: turn the car on to acces­so­ry mode, flip on the wipers, then turn the car off when the arms are in the high­est posi­tion
  • Take blades out of their pack­ag­ing and note the hard­ware to make sure it’s cor­rect for the wiper arm, or to see if you need an adapter (most wiper blades come with adapters. These Bosch Icons did, but I did­n’t need them)
Did­n’t need these adapters
  • Look at the car’s wiper blade attach­ment
  • Press the Square But­ton with one hand, while grasp­ing the left rec­tan­gu­lar part and Pull to the Left (might have to wig­gle it a lit­tle as you pull)
  • Keep pulling until the entire blade comes out

Note: Either use a fold­ed microfiber cloth or the card­board pack­ag­ing of the wiper blade to rest under­neath the wiper arm

Com­par­isons (Bosch Icon OE vs Motor­craft OE)

  • Do it back­wards: line up the new blade with the wiper arm and push in until it clicks and locks into place
  • Boom! Done! Very easy!
  • Repeat on the oth­er side!

Old Removal

The old one has a small spi­der web!

New Replace­ment

Kind of annoys me that the square does­n’t pop all the way in, but it’s sol­id
Test­ed! No streaks!

Front Wiper Replace­ment: COMPLETE!

Rear

  • First off, let’s inspect the replace­ment blade
  • Pick up the wiper arm as far as it will let you go

Warn­ing: Too much power/pressure can break the arm at the heel of the assem­bly!!

  • Grasp the Wiper Arm with your left hand, and Grasp the Wiper Blade with your right hand, and Pull Firm­ly but Care­ful­ly to the RIGHT, away from the arm until you hear a *Click*
  • Now. This can be the hard part depend­ing on how tight it’s in there: To remove the blade, Tilt it as Far as it Will Go (I was able to do this both ways… maybe it’s worn)

Warn­ing: Again, too much goril­la-ing can break the wiper arm! I actu­al­ly man­aged to break the entire replace­ment blade by forc­ing it too hard. Lucky the wiper arm is… okay…? As far as I know

As you can see, I was able to do this with just one hand. Mind you, the blade is the one orig­i­nal to the car, so it could just be weath­ered

  • Place a fold­ed microfiber cloth under­neath the wiper arm
  • To replace the blade, first make sure the blade is Ori­ent­ed the Cor­rect Direc­tion (Open­ing to the left, and loop part to the right. That’s why you had to pull right to loosen it)
Yeaaaah­hh… Did­n’t put the microfiber under­neath the 1st time. Not rec­om­mend­ed.
  • Do it back­wards: Line up the Cross­bar of the wiper arm with the open­ing of the replace­ment blade and Press Upwards until you hear a *Click,* then grasp and Push to the LEFT until it slides in

Visu­al of the under­side of the arm

  • Clean off the wind­shield under­neath and that’s it!
Test­ed. No streaks!

Rear Wiper Replace­ment: COMPLETE!!

Notes

7/13/2026: I man­aged to break the new replace­ment blade by being too force­ful and am lucky that I did­n’t ful­ly break the arm alto­geth­er. Because I did that, though, I got to see how the wiper is put togeth­er and turns out it’s just slid on there. I actu­al­ly installed it again, but when I went to remove it, the attach­ment came off alto­geth­er, and I need­ed to use pli­ers (not the long ones, those could­n’t grasp it) to push the dis­placed attach­ment off the wiper arm. End­ed up reusing the old blade because it works just fine, and used super­glue on the new one in case I want to try again in the future.

Just slid the attach­ment and the end cap back on

Back to Car Stuff

2022 Ford Maverick Fender Flares by Air Design Installation

updat­ed 11/13/2022

N.B. I am a DIY­er with no auto­mo­tive exper­tise

  • Cost: $669 + tax
  • Dif­fi­cul­ty: Easy
  • Mate­ri­als: Fend­er Flares, Instruc­tion Sheet, 16 retain­er clips, Auto­mo­tive Trim Removal Tools/Retainer Clip Removal Tool (or a screw­driv­er, but much eas­i­er with the tools), rub­bing alco­hol, paper tow­el, polyurethane sealant, scissors/knife, tape, stool (option­al)

Ship­ping

Pret­ty tall box, light
OEM

They each come inside a sleeve
Stamped with the item part

Instal­la­tion

Instruc­tion sheet and fend­er flare

Wipe the install loca­tion with alco­hol, then remove the 5 retain­er clips (3 on the door side and 2 on the front end mak­ing sure there are 3 in between).

NOTE: The low­est clip on the door-side is a short clip as com­pared to the longer clips all the oth­ers have. This makes re-instal­la­tion impos­si­ble, so while you’re not sup­posed to remove the 3 towards the front of the Mav­er­ick, I swapped the mid­dle clip with the short one which fits per­fect­ly.

Remove these 3
Remove the blues, Keep the reds

To dry fit and mark the align­ment points, you place, and rese­cure 3 of the retain­er clips (don’t have to push them in all the way).

Dry fit
Don’t have to push the clip all the way in, you’ll take it out in a sec­ond

Instruc­tions called for a grease pen to mark the align­ment, but I used painter’s tape as a guide. Less cleanup.

Remove the clips and the fend­er flare, then per the instruc­tions, cut the 3M tape in the mid­dle and tape them off. Hon­est­ly, before I real­ized I could use a plas­tic pry tool to help, this was the longest, most frus­trat­ing part of the instal­la­tion. It’s impos­si­ble to get the edges peeled up with­out nails! The pry tool made it a cinch.

NOTE: As I’ll post a pic­ture a lit­tle fur­ther down, just peel most of 3M lin­er at the bot­tom part of the flare (clos­est to the wheel). Oth­er­wise, it’s real­ly hard to pull it off lat­er.

Pry tool is very help­ful here
Peel and secure more of the bot­tom piece than I did here.

Polyurethane sealant. I used Auto­mo­tive Amaz­ing Goop because I hap­pened to have it on hand. The lit­tle noz­zle I bought for it is super-duper help­ful. Use your sealant in the built-in chan­nel

Here we go! Same as before, place the flare on, line it up, secure it with the 3 clips. Now with pres­sure as you go, pull the red 3M lin­er off.

Pull and press

As men­tioned above, the low­est 3M lin­er got stuck under­neath and was dif­fi­cult to remove, so just pull most it off before plac­ing the flare. Makes it much eas­i­er.

Stuck. Had a bit of a time try­ing to get it out after every­thing else is secure

Yay! Here are the 2 front sides! After doing the first, the 2nd is very easy.

Mid­way point!

AAAAND here is where I hit a snag. As it turns out, the rear retain­er clips are ALL the small/short clips. And there are 7 on either side that need to be used. I tried, but they are way too short to be able to hold the rear flares in place. Thanks, Ford, for that heads up! So, I have ordered what I think is the equiv­a­lent of the OE clips and then a set of gener­ic clips just in case.

The installed flares look good, though. 🙂

CONTINUED!

The retain­er clips from Ama­zon arrived and, wow! I can’t even tell them apart!

Old vs new

Alrighty, then, let’s get installing! Removed the 7 stub­by clips from the rear. Here’s an image for size com­par­i­son. I said ear­li­er that the most time-con­sum­ing part of this install was peel­ing the 3M liner…it is not. The most time-con­sum­ing part is try­ing to remove these stub­by clips. They spin all around the place and it’s more dif­fi­cult than the longer clips to get a good hold. You get into the groove after a time, though.

com­par­i­son

Dur­ing the dry-fit, new, longer retain­er clips work per­fect­ly!

Peel, then secure!

Installed! Looks like I’m going to need to go back and apply trim restore again…the fend­er flares are clear­ly new­er

Repeat on the oth­er side! Now…I will add a warn­ing here, because after doing 3 of them I was get­ting a bit cocky. For the very last flare, I decid­ed NOT to do a dry-fit/align­ment tape. Don’t do that. It end­ed up fit­ting just off-kel­ter to where the retain­ing clips would­n’t even go all the way in, but the adhe­sive had already stuck and there was no going back.

It’s done! Here’s a before and after install pic­ture of the last flare.

Com­ple­to!! It’s amaz­ing how much dif­fer­ent the Mav­er­ick looks with the fend­er flares on! I hon­est­ly can’t real­ly remem­ber what it looked like before!

Notes

  • They look real­ly good. Real­ly.
  • Instal­la­tion was an over­all breeze after I pro­cured the prop­er parts. As you can see in my pic­tures, I do not have a dri­ve­way, but nev­er had to move my car out of the park­ing space to install these.
  • After a week of dri­ving, the flares give notice­ably more drag and there­fore reduce the gas effi­cien­cy. That part I’m not as big a fan of, espe­cial­ly since mine is a hybrid. Then I start­ed won­der­ing if the cab spoil­er would help the aero­dy­nam­ics at all or is sim­ply anoth­er cos­met­ic thing? The inter­net is not yield­ing any real infor­ma­tion about that. Hmmm…next addi­tion? 😀