My Horn Is Terrible - Here's how I made it better.

[Tinker1980]

We all know what our horns sound like. And it seems to me, here where I live, that it gets largely ignored.

So I decided to fix that. And I took pictures. For this job, you will need a 10mm and a 12mm wrench.

First, we pop the hood on our mirage. Head to the belt end of the engine.



The horn is immediately in front of the A/C compressor, on a bracket mounted to the radiator support.



Unplug the wire. It uses a squeeze tab. Once you unplug it, remove the 10mm nut. The threads may be a bit gunked up, and you'll not be able to unscrew the nut with your fingers once you have it loose. You'll need the wrench.

It looks like this. Isn't it cute?



This is what I replaced it with. $21 at autozone. This is the "low tone" horn. It's quite loud.



You will find that the bracket on the car doesn't have a big enough hole for this horn. You can either drill it out, or use the brackets that came with the horn. To remove the bracket, you will need a 12mm wrench. The bolt is on the front of the radiator support. Be careful not to hit the A/C line with the wrench.

Once you have your bracket drilled or replaced, it's time to put the new horn on. The factory horn grounds out through the mounting stud. This new horn has two terminals. It came with a wire that had a spade connector on one end and a ring connector on the other.



Put the horn down in the spot the old one came from. Plug in the other wire.




Enjoy your new, better sounding horn.