Horn Troubleshooting and Radio Removal

Recently my horn stopped working, and although I seemingly fixed it for a time it eventually stopped again. Since I didn’t have properly sized insulators, I was initially suspicious of the bullet connectors I had used reasoning that they were coming undone due to the vibrations of the running car. On eBay I found someone selling the same model of horn, a Klaxon brand model TR90 “low”, that used spade connectors instead. When it arrived I hooked it but still got no honk. My multimeter told me that I was getting 12 volts at the horn when I pushed the button. Manually grounding the other side of the horn to the car definitely produced a loud, sharp honk. This lead me to believe that the ground wire from the horn to the steering wheel switch. Thus began a day of disassembling a good amount of the dashboard.

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Supernatural

Aside from amateur mechanics one of my guilty pleasures is the TV show Supernatural. For those unfamiliar, it was the continuing story of two brothers who hunt monsters. They managed to keep this show going for 15 seasons with this recent one being the last. After a mid-season production delay due to COVID, the final episodes have aired and the story is now over. I mention all this for one simple reason – in the penultimate episode a 240 wagon was briefly featured front and center.

So I bid farewell to Supernatural and sincerely hope the wagon they smashed up for that episode gets fixed.

She’s Touchy

The new exhaust gasket came sooner than I thought but I didn’t have time (or good weather) to address it until this past weekend. The car stayed up on jacks for a few days. This may become significant later because after I did put the gasket in and let the car down I attempted to start the engine and got nothing but the starter cranking. This made no sense to me since the engine had run just fine a few days earlier. Did being tilted to the side on jacks for a few days somehow upset something? I can’t imagine why that would be, but what else could it be? The engine was running fine just a few days ago and I hadn’t changed anything related to it. Time for diagnostics.

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HONK HONK

The other day I was driving to the store and found myself in that common situation where the guy at the light in front of me was busy looking at his phone and didn’t notice the light change. I went to give him the little “toot toot” horn to refocus him but, to my dismay, found that my horn would not toot. When I got home I took the grill off to get access to the horn and see what the story was. The story was one that has become well known to me: everything was corroded to hell. Verdigris had eaten away at the copper connectors and the plastic insulation around them was falling apart

The horn on my car is a single horn type (some Volvos have two apparently) that connect to the horn switch with two wires that terminate in 3.5mm bullet connectors. Of course the only connectors I had on hand were the 3.9mm type. One trip to Amazon for a small kit of the correct size connectors and a couple of days wait later I was ready to fix it. I made two short pigtails and soldered them to female connectors. These went into the existing connector housing. The insulators that came with the new connectors were nowhere near thick enough to fit the space inside the housing so I ended up wrapping them with vinyl tape about 2 or 3mm thick. I clipped off the existing crappy connectors and soldered the new assembly in their place and zip tied it in place. The result was a working horn. TOOT TOOT!

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