Recently, my wipers started slowing down and now they hardly move. I suspect the wiper motor, and am trying to get at it for a look, but I can't get the wiper arms off the assembly. I have so far pried off the top plastic cover caps and removed the nuts from both of them, but the arms won't come off. I can't seem to find any obvious clips or anything that appears to be holding them down, I've tried raising the wipers, and I tried (lightly) a gear remover tool, but they don't want to budge - am I missing something here?

 

Well, I guess I'll answer my own question then!

After some friendly advice from a local Ford dealership's mechanic (big shout out to Thorncrest Ford in the Toronto area) I was told to go ahead and use my gear puller, and to put as much pressure on it as I wanted. According to the mechanic, "just when you think it's going to break, give the gear puller another turn of the handle, and the wiper arm will pop right off. Sure enough he was right! It sounded like a firecracker when the arms finally gave way, but they did give finally come off! Yay!

So, to take the wipers off of an Edge, I used the dull end of a teaspoon to pop off the top covers (dome-shaped black plastic just above the pivot point of each wiper). That exposed the nut, which I took off with a standard ratchet wrench and appropriately-sized socket. Then I pushed the prongs of the gear puller under the wiper arm, and used the ratchet wrench to force the arm off (my gear puller had a socket end on top, which was made to fit a socket/wrench combo....much more torque this way, then the first puller I bought, which just had a C-clamp style 2" arm to use as the tightening method). I found that the pointed end of the gear puller would slide off the end of the bolt every time, so I solved that problem by loosely screwing on the original nut that I had earlier taken off. I left the top of the nut raised a bit off the top of the bolt, so that the tip of the gear puller couldn't stray off from the top of the nut - worked like a charm.
The wiper arms eventually popped under the pressure of the gear puller, and each time, I thought I had broke something by the sound of the pop from the splines giving up their grip on the wiper arms.
After both arms were off, four screws, and four plastic clips had to come off of the plastic shrouding along the length of the windshield, which exposed the wiper motor and linkage. I ordered a motor from an aftermarket supplier, and found it was an incompatable part. I got a refund and tried another supplier, only to find another wrong part. For $20 extra, I bought the new motor from a Ford dealership, and when I went to pick up, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the new part was the wiper motor AND the linkage. Apparently on an 09 Edge, the two are sold as one piece and the linkage is actually crimped onto the motor. So I put the new part in, reversing the above process, and voilla, my wipers work again - YAY!!

One more thing - with the new linkage, the marks I had drawn to show the proper wiper positioning were gone! I had to guess at where to put them, and I wasn't quite right (driver's side didn't quite go close enough to the left edge of the winshield as I would have liked). I thought it was close enough for me, and left it at that. An hour later, I was out in daylight, and I noticed that there are two markings etched into the windshield which indicate where the wipers should be located in the down position. The markings look like two letter T's, one is upside-down and bellow it, is a right-side-up T. I assume that the ends of each wiper should be located between the two T's, but since it's pouring rain/sleet/snow outside right now, I'm not going to tinker with the positioning until there's a long dry spell

Just thought I'd throw this out there, in case anyone else ever has this problem. The dealer wanted $400 for the entire job, taxes in. I bought
the motor and linkage together for $200, so I ended up saving enough money for some nice replacement wiper blades ($50 for both) and a bottle of something nice for me to celebrate with