TruckHacks - Airhorns

I was driving home from the grocery store one evening and this moron started to cut me off. I honked the horn but he didn't seem to care or notice and continued sliding over forcing me to slam on the brakes. When I got home I rooted around under the hood to take a look at the horns. There's two of them and they're both fairly anemic sounding. For a full sized pickup, this just wasn't acceptable.

I started looking around at airhorns to either replace the stock horns or to use in conjuction. After scouring the internet looking for airhorns that have a hefty low end bass note, I was disappointed to learn that almost all the airhorns were more of the train horn type sound. Initially, I decided to not do the hack because, for the price, I really didn't want that kind of sound. And no... I was not interested in the "Dixie" horn kit! <grin>

About a week ago, I found a pair of airhorns in the sale catalog for Harbor freight for about $24.00. I figured for that price, if I really didn't like them in my truck, maybe I could use them elsewhere (like my daughter's trike) <grin>.

It took me longer to decide how and where to install them than it did to do the actual install. Once I had them physically mounted, it was time to tackle the wiring. I didn't really want to have a separate switch or pushbutton I'd have to hit, so I decided to tie into the existing horn wiring. Once I got that all soldered together I was pretty happy with the sound of the airhorn and the stock horns together. Let me tell you. It's loud. I could only take a few seconds of standing in front of the truck after hitting the panic button on my remote. It's still a train whistle type airhorn but it doesn't sound quite as bad as I thought it would.

Above are the pics of the installed air horns. The kit is really simple. Two airhorns (high and low), a 'Y' adapter, three feet of surgical tubing, and a 12v driven air compressor. One downside to this particular kit of airhorns is that the mounting brackets *require* that you'll be able to get at the nuts to tighten them down. That was tough to pull off without drilling some new holes somewhere on the truck. Once again, you can see that Dexion steel has come to the rescue. I love that stuff!

UPDATE: I found another use for the airhorns! Every Halloween I convert my garage into Bishop's Dungeon. I had the truck parked on the road along the sidewalk where people had to walk by it to get to the dungeon. After a little while, I started hitting the panic button on the key fob to set off the airhorns when groups of people walked by. This was by far the most entertaining portion of Halloween evening as women screamed, people ducked and ran, and children dropped their bags of candy.