It’s been a long time between drinks here at Driveanotherday.com – I logged in today to discover that the last time I’d put anything up for your amusement was about 4 months ago…
So what have I been doing in that time? Working, filming and relocating my base of operations around 1800 kilometres up the road. It was a hell of time getting up here to be honest. But it’s also been a productive time as I’ve discovered an addition to the list of things I won’t be skimping on when it comes to keeping the War Wagon a happy beastie..
So greetings from the Gold Coast. And yes, you can now add ‘wipers’ to the tally of things you really shouldn’t go cheap on when getting your ride from A to B in relative comfort. This now joins the list which includes motor oil, brake fluid, brake pads, coolant and the tyres themselves.
Previously I’d grab whatever was on special figuring ‘meh, why go expensive when they’re all the same rubber anyway?’ and nine times out of ten it’d be the store house brand (it’s like house wine really, it’s still wine…but you know the slightly pricier ones will taste better) priced at roughly less than twenty bucks to do both blades. Of course they’d do the job just fine for the first few occasions but then you’d find yourself in a torrential downpour and your wipers would give up faster than a boy scout in a UFC title fight. The last set I had not only gave up sweeping water off the glass (it more hovered over the water and shave a millimetre or two off the back end), it made a horrendous noise while doing it.
SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Oh god, it’s raining and I can’t see sh-
SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
This is like the windscreen equivalent of nails down a blackboa-
SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
So during one of those hammering rainfalls I promised myself that when I had some spare coin (I own a turbo so you know how rare those occasions are) I would invest in a decent set of wiper blad-
SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Damnit.
So after a garage sale last month and ironically on a day where it was both blazing hot and clearer than a Windex factory, I shelled out over $50 on a complete Tridon wiper blade set and happily replaced my very short term house blades (not naming names but the company rhymes with Hooper Heap Hautos) in what turned out to be the cleverest thing I’d done in quite some time. Because the first time I got to use them was stupidly early in the morning in some of the roughest conditions we’d faced in a long time.

3am leaving Bendigo in pitch dark and the rain is belting down around the two cars leaving the in laws farm to start the epic two and a half day interstate race to the Gold Coast hopefully beating the removalist truck to the storage locker. It came down so hard that if I had my old wiper blades on the wagon, I’d have to have pulled over five minutes into the journey and napped for the next 8 hours waiting for it to clear. The Tridon’s kept it clear and hummed quietly to themselves while doing it. No inhuman screeching, no decaying rubber with every sweep. When we left Sydney after a quick lunch, sunshine turned into Armageddon hail in 4.5 seconds and the Tridon’s proved their worth once again. We couldn’t see the other car in all the storm, but we could see in front of us and that stopped us from possibly smacking into another car. Or a tree perhaps. Or more storms.

My previous wiper blades would have handed me a form for workers compensation and gone on stress leave at the first drop of ice.
Useless.
So fans of this page, take heed. There’s not enough time in your life to put up with cheap wiper blades that fall apart at the first sign of moisture. Spend the extra coin, keep your vision clear, your family safe and the cabin noise quiet. And if you’re planning to drive from Bendigo to the Gold Coast in Queensland anytime soon, give yourself at least a week. After all of those early starts and hours of driving through rain, hail, wind and whatever the gods could throw at us, the truck beat us there anyway…