Louder horn for CJ?

[mitsfan]

Planning to get one of the above 300Hz truck horns next week.

I can't wait to put it in my CJ and use with the existing OEM horns, will let everyone know how it goes.

[scraverX]

That will sure as heck get noticed. And I sorta like the fact you say it'd be delayed a bit..

toot = oi!
HOOOONK = You frickin PILLOCK!

hehe

[JaCe]

Any idea on price? Thanks for doing alot of research but I just wanted to chime in and add that my $25 Stebel dual-horns which I bought from Singapore were definitely sufficient at improving the sound and didn't really involve anything more than removing the stock horn on my Civic and splicing the wires into the new one.

I am not associated with them but have been a satisfied customer. Maybe we can try to find something like this for a group buy although I suspect it's probably not much cheaper doing a GB anyway.

[mitsfan]

JaCe,

Online Autoparts has a range of Stebel electric and Nautilus electric-air horns, ranging in price from $20 to $109.

The 300 Hz Nautilus electric-air horn is $89.

[bungfritz]

Interesting mod, i might consider this also. When i bought my lancer, i was embarrased after using my horn for the first time. Very girly, hehehe ( no offence to any girls out there)

[The X]

Stebel alarm clock FTW! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zEH5GxPNO8

[mitsfan]

The 300Hz Stebel electric/air horn is now in and going, and working nicely. I have not yet had need to use it on the road, but the two people that have heard it working along with the two OEM horns report being startled and surprised by its impact.

I can now personally verify that while the horn has a relatively rapid response for an air horn, that the two electric OEM horns respond noticeably more immediately, and the air-horn takes a good fraction of a second longer to build up to full output. As other forums have indicated, this actually makes for a more usable arrangement, with progressively longer horn button depression times increasing the seriousness of the emitted horn sound, but the OEM horns still providing an almost immediate response to start the warning ASAP.

In terms of installation, I purchased the 300Hz horn with an optional Horn Wiring Harness kit, which made the whole process more straight forward.

Working out where to put the 30A relay that comes with the horn, and where to put the horn itself, took as much time as actually putting them in. I did manage to find existing empty mounting holes for both the relay and the horn, so no drilling was required.

The relay is mounted inside the engine bay, right of and below the fuse box, while the new horn is mounted just left and below the hood release lever, just below the black cover plate. With these locations, the lengths of the cables in the Horn Wiring Harness Kit were just right, reaching the battery terminals, and the existing top right OEM horn nicely.

The only bit of cutting I had to do was underneath the black cover plate, left of the hood release, to prevent some of the black cover moulding from protruding down into the new horn. I made a vertical cut of about 3cm and then folded the flap back horizontally, which now rests on top of the horn. None of this is very visible from either above or outside. Also, the flap now provides some failsafe downwards pressure on the top of the horn compressor - if the single horn mounting bolt ever becomes loose, the flap will help prevent the horn from popping up off the mounting bolt and falling around free.

While I am waiting to see how the response of other road uses is altered by the addition of the 300Hz horn, at this stage I am pleased with the outcome. This is one of those mods that doesn't cost much, but makes a disproportionatly large improvement.

[squala]

As I recall only air horns are illegal for street use

Musical air horns are not allowed but I read somewhere normal air horns are ok. I also came across something that Victorian law requires the original horn to still be there.

[mitsfan]

Stebel 300Hz 12VDC electric/air horn installation instructions printed on back of box:

[mitsfan]

Stebel horn Harness Kit installation guide:

[mitsfan]

I went to the trouble of scanning, uploading, and posting the above install docs because when I was doing my pre-purchase research I could not find these on the Internet, but would have liked to have viewed them at that stage. Now that I have the actual units in my possession, I can make them available to other people.

[kayman]

Wow mitsfan thanks so much for the details ... So if you wanted to just toot the oem horn is that possible .. can you go toot toot by quickly pushing the horn twice? and if you hold on to the horn the oem plays and then the air horn kicks in is that correct?

[mitsfan]

With the basic arrangement shown in the Harness Kit Installation diagram above (which is how I have mine wired), there is only the relay switching delay (negligible) plus the air-horn pressure delay (about 0.1 seconds) before the air horn sound output starts ramping up.

When you depress the horn briefly you get some combination of both the OEM horns and the added Stebel air horn, with the contribution from the air horn increasing as the horn button depression time increases. In this case there is no clear period of OEM-horn-only operation.

You can implement other options however:

A) You can install an additional air-horn enable switch (preferably inside on the dash), as in the horn installation schematic diagrams, to enable the 300Hz air horn when you want to use it, or disable it when you don't.

B) The buffering relay provides a convenient point to implement a significant time delay if you want, by adding a time delay circuit of some form before the relay. This way you could implement an OEM-horn-only delay of whatever you like; 0.5s, 1s or 2s, ...

I will have to gain more actual road use with the horn to see if it is worth exploring either of the above options. At the moment I think the simplest current solution is the easiest to use and install.

[blade888]

Nice stuff Mitsfan!

I wasn't too fussed about the horn but after reading all this has got me tempted to get it

+1!

[JaCe]

Sounds good. I'm about to go buy my own from Singapore Got any pics of where you installed it and how hard it was to wire it in?

From experience with the Civic, this was a bit trickier than expected because Honda doesn't just use wires but rather, it had a proprietary plug for the horn which required pulling the wires out of and splicing.