Horn help...

Kevin - Illinois

Kevin - Illinois

Senior Member
This is embarrassing, but I can not figure out how to connect my horn on my 53 Mainline. The car is 12 volt negative ground, otherwise stock. The car was completely rewired before I bought it, but no accommodations were made for the horn. There is a wire that comes out of the steering column. How can I connect a relay to this and make the horn work with the steering column. I currently have a small push button under the dash and the horn works fine...
 
The wire in the column usually completes a path to GROUND from the coil side of the relay when you push the horn button. Does that help? DD
 
Since you have a working horn, I that would cause me to believe that there is a horn relay already installed somewhere. You should be able to trace the wire back to the relay, and then replace it with the one that goes to the column, since horn buttons usually are a grounding switch.

First thing that I would do is make sure that your steering wheel horn button has all the goodies in it to work properly. You sure don't want it grounding and causing the horn to honk when it is not supposed to. On both of my '40s, I pulled the old wire out and soldered a new wire in it's place, just to make sure the wire was good.

The wire coming out of the bottom should be able to replace the one that feeds the button that is currently mounted under the dash.

Take a peek at this page, and see if it helps you out some. http://www.rattlebars.com/avalanche/relay_basics.html
 
How is your current button wired? Does it supply power to the horn or is it a ground to a relay? As V8COOPMAN stated above, the column wire is a ground wire. With a 12v+ system looking at a 56 or later wiring diagram can be helpful. Drew a rough diagram of the 57 Ford wiring diagram if you have trouble with reading the diagrams.:)
 

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Ok...this is probably gonna sound bad, but I'll go ahead and throw it out there.

The last example, on that page, is what I have connected to the grounding switch on both of my '40's start button. The way that I have it wired feeds 12v to the Battery prong, the Load output goes to the starter solenoid, and the Switch prong goes to the grounding switch. Both of them start every time.
 
This did it! Thank you so much! So simple...:D



JSeery said:
How is your current button wired? Does it supply power to the horn or is it a ground to a relay? As V8COOPMAN stated above, the column wire is a ground wire. With a 12v+ system looking at a 56 or later wiring diagram can be helpful. Drew a rough diagram of the 57 Ford wiring diagram if you have trouble with reading the diagrams.:)
Click to expand...
 
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