How about QuadRiceJets?I've been away for much too long. Since this thread is about cars and one of my current projects is about cars, I might as well enlighten you.
A friend of mine receltly have me a nonfunctional Delco Remy car horn. For reasons which explain why I'm a member of this forum, I ground off the rivets and took it apart to try and fix it. It turns out that car horns work a lot the way buzzers and bells work. There's a little set of contact points in there that are normally closed and when power is applied, the diaphragm moves and opens them up. This disconnects the power and the diaphragm moves back to rest and closes the points back up repeating the process. That's what makes the sound. In this case, the points were corroded, so I just scraped off the corrosion and it worked like new. I sealed up the thing with some caulk and used bolts instead of rivets.
You may or may not know this, but most car horns come in pairs. Usually one tone is A-450Hz and the other is F-360Hz. The one my friend gave me was a low tone, or F, so I needed an A to complete the pair.
I've been making regular trips to the local scrapyard lately and one of the things I've been looking for is old car horns. I found a few Delco Remy A's that worked, a ford, a Renalut, a couple Hondas, and some other ones, probably aftermarket. The funny thing was that usually the lower tone was broken while the higher tone worked in a given car. Some cars like the Renault and my Civic only have one tone. That's why I'm looking for new horns, anyway, to replace that little squeaker.
So I go to test one of the Delco Remy A's with the F I rebuilt and lo and behold, it's much softer than the F. I guess I rebuilt it pretty well. So, I start to rebuild the A tone because I figure that should make it louder like the F and make a better pair. I was on a webiste of a place that rebuilds horns and they say that the rebuilt ones sound better ie. louder. So, I did everything the same as the first one, but when I get it together, it just makes little squeaking noises. It turns out that I used too much caulk and caulk isn't really the best thing to use in there because not much air can get in to dry it. So I redo it this time with RTV and lo and behold it works, although still not as loud as the F, but it's close enough.
BTW, I also got an air horn off of an old truck they had there. It has kind of a high pitch for an air horn, but it's still pretty loud. This one also has 2 tones. They had all sorts of things living in them (I say they because it's actually 2 horns in one). One of them had a derelict wasp nest in it and they both had some kind of cotton looking stuff plugging them. When I hooked it up to the air compressor, all the junk blew out, but one of the tones didn't work, so I decided to rebuild this one, too.
It turns out these work a little differently. The air blows in at a gap between a brass (copper?) diaphragmm and the hole that goes to the "exit" of the horn. This causes the diaphragm to flap back and forth covering and uncovering the hole, kind of like a kazoo. The length of the horn determines the tone. longer=lower. Actually, the same thing goes for the Delco Remys. The lower ones have a longer channel coiled up in them.
So anyway, I rebuilt the one side, but it turns out that it's the other tone that was not working, so I still have to rebuild that one.
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Posted - 12 Sep 2003 : 13:52:10
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