This turned into a hassle and I learned a few lessons. Stick to low mileage OEM replacement parts. Don't buy poor quality aftermarket parts from Amazon/China with no reviews.
The amazon linkage that I bought (
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07ZHTSY7S...fed_asin_title) had too much travel so the driver side wiper blade was hitting the A pillar. At the time, I also had to take the car to a shop to get an exhaust mount fixed and the shop ended up breaking the wiper motors somehow when they gave it back to me (And they didn't fix the exhaust mount either

). I didn't say anything because I didn't want to bring the car to that shop ever again. Those grease monkeys would have broken something else if I asked them to own up and fix the wipers. The only reason I took it there is because it was a block away from my home and the exhaust was about to fall off the car.
Anyway, I had to take the wiper motor transmission back out and when I opened up the motor, some of the teeth on the internal plastic gear had been ground away. Everything was junk.
I ended up finding a low mileage wiper transmission from a '98 2.8 FWD part out near me with 30,000 miles on it. '98's have the same wiper transmission, but a different motor and connector to the '01. So I bought a used wiper motor from ebay for the '01 (8D1955113C). Then I swapped the motor over to the wiper transmission and put it back in the car. I thought that was the end of it. I put the key in the ignition with the wipers off and the wipers just start running and they don't stop (I didn't put the wiper arms back on yet, but the spindles were moving in the off position). 7 eye rolls later, I check the forums to see if anyone had the problem. Vague responses that it could be the relay, a fuse, or the wiper motor. I had opened up the old wiper motor and discovered how it worked. There's a moving contactor that sits in a pin that is connected to the wiper motor gear. This is how the wiper finds the park position. I suspected that maybe this circuit had gone bad on the used motor that I bought:
It didn't look like there was anything wrong with the used one that I bought, but I swapped the park position circuit over from my original oem motor and installed it back in the car, and it's working properly now. What a hassle.
Pro tip. You do NOT need to remove the ECU housing to get the wiper transmission out. The trick is to activate the wiper arm motor until the linkage is clocked towards the front of the car. When parked, the arm on the motor points to the passenger side of the car. You need to get the motor to move so the linkage points towards the front of the car Then the entire transmission is small enough to wiggle it out with only removing the cover to the ecu housing. Key in ignition, trigger the wipers for half a second, then remove the key from the ignition to get them to freeze. You may need to try that a few times until the arm stops in the right spot to slim down the whole assembly enough to get it out.
Wiper motor needs to be clocked like so:
I only discovered this because when I originally took the bad motor out, they were clocked in the wrong position since the gears were stripped. The very first time that I removed it to deal with the linkage issue in the thread start, I pulled the whole ECU housing out because in park position, you can't get it out. These cars are getting older so messing with potentially brittle wiring going to the ECU is not something you want to do.
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