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So it’s not much of a repair question as a safety question, but I figured this fit in better here.
I drive a 2000 honda civic and somewhat recently upgraded from a 91. There were a few things that I miss about the 91. One was the dual tone horn the 91 had. It makes it sound more aggressive and louder compared to my signle “meep” horn.
Now, there are a few options I have thought about.
One was, grabbing a set of Honda Prelude horns because they had a dual horn setup.
The second was grabbing a set of aftermarket horns.
With these options I get worried about two things. Since the horn is a safety device, I need it to be reliable. This could be possibly a factor of life or death. So would I have any issue with anything in the switch changing from 1 horn to a 2 horn setup?
The second is that I do not want to hack up my wiring harness to put the aftermarket dual horn setup in. Since the 2000 Civic uses a proprietary plug, I’d have to cut the end off and wire in standard bayonet connectors. One Idea I had was to make a harness that could plug into the stock plug, but I am having an issue on where I Could potentially get the female portion of the plug as most of the time they are attached to the horn.
Any thoughts on the plug and the switch?
Thanks again for the help.
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You should worry about the current draw.
In general two horns are going to draw twice as much current as one horn.
Now for the second or two every week that you use a horn, that’s not a huge concern, you’re not going to burn out any wires. However the horn switch or relay may not be up to handling twice the current, and it may burn up or stick open or stick closed, and that’s not good.
Perhaps the best way would be to have the original horn circuit just activate a new horn relay, and have that horn relay get the power for the horn directly, through a fuse, from the battery.
I believe if you check the wiring diagram out for the car, you will find that the stock horn is fed 12V+ directly from the under hood fuse box, through the same circuit that powers the brake lights. The horn button activates a relay that grounds the horns.
Therefore, if you are going with an add on relay, there is a bit of extra wiring to do. Unplug the wiring from your existing horn. It has two conductors. On the CAR side of that connection, one wire will test 12V+, the OTHER wire should be 12V- only when the horn button is pressed. The 12V+ will connect to one terminal on each of your new horns. Connect a small fuse (1 amp)to the positive terminal of the battery, and feed that to pin 86 on your relay. Pin 85 will go to the car side of the horn wiring connection, to the terminal that tests 12V- when the horn button is pressed.
Pin 30 on your relay will connect to the remaining terminal of BOTH of your horns, and pin 87 will go to ground.
If you are concerned about the factory wiring supporting the dual horns, instead of connecting the 12V+ from the existing horn wiring to the new horns, you could run a fused wire from the battery positive to the two new horns, and the rest of the wiring as I explained above.
Yeah, I forgot about that. I wonder if I can replicate the Honda prelude’s system though. I can’t imagine them using any heavier gauge wiring. Where is the relay held? I have the manual I am sure I Can look but just incase someone knew it off hand. I Wonder if I can just get a horn relay from a prelude. Right now the horn definitely isn’t the worst.
Honestly, I would probably go ahead and wire up the 2nd horn and see what happens. I would be surprised if the relay isn’t able to support two horns. If the relay fails, then replace it with a higher capacity relay.
As far as I can tell, the relay is on the drivers side, remove the trim panel below the steering column, look to the left of the column up near the dash board, all the way over the the left, right against the kick panel. There are two relays together there with a white clip keeping them in place. Pull the clip up, and out, and then you can remove the relays. The relay closest to you is for cruise control, the one closest to the engine / firewall is the horn relay. I think they are pretty standard relays, and probably capable of 30 or 40 amps.
Alright, I’ll have to give it a shot. Now the next problem is wiring it up without hacking the harness. I’d almost like to create a horn sub-harness. However the hardest part is finding the connector that is on the horn itself as an a-la-carte plug. Any advice?
Amazingly enough I can find the part that connects directly into the horn or the male portion if you will.
I would go to an auto recycler and cut out the wiring and connectors from a Honda with 2 horns and wire them into your car.
I doubt very much that there will be problem with your car using 2 horns.
That’s a good idea. I’ll have to do some research in regard to that. Even if the relay does blow, I can find a replacement.
I just do not want to hack up the harness. Especially for the horn. For the radio, it is fine. Not really a life or death situation.
Hello, I know this is an old thread but I figure it’d be silly to create a whole new thread regarding the same topic.
I had some electrical questions. Lets say when and if I add a horn, the extra load added to that circuit really shouldn’t effect the switch at the steering wheel because of the relay right? I have watched the basics of relays, should brush up on it though. I ask this because the horn switch is integrated into the Airbag and that is something that I do not want to mess with.
I think I might go with wysetech’s idea of cutting off the sub-harness for a 2 horn setup. I really wish honda didn’t make it’s own connector and just went with the standard connectors like in the earlier horns.
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