Being one who always seems to do things the hard way, I bought a Howard's "Little Big Horn" rather than just bow to the conventional wisdom and install a Steibel. Yesterday, I finally got around to installing it.

The Howard's Horn unlike the Steibel , and the Harbor Freight or Pep Boys knockoffs has a separate compressor and chromed metal trumpet connected by a length of hose. They also supply som cool stainless braid to cover the plastic tubing. I had this set up on my Ultra and the sound is piercing. http://www.howardshorns.com/lhorn.wav

While this, at first look, appeared to be a simple solution to the problem of getting a cagers attention, there are a couple of issues that made this project take a lot longer than it should have.

1) I will analyze the hell out of something before I tackle it.

2) I am electrically challenged, ham fisted and have an inability to accept my own failings, which means I take a lot of breaks to cool down so that I don't screw stuff up because I'm angry. Which I think you will agree gives me ample reason to exercise item 1.

3) I wanted to keep the stock horn functional, to balance the tone of the high pitch shriek that the "Little Big Horn" puts out.

4) Appropriate mounting locations for the compressor and the trumpet behind the Vision bodywork are very limited.

5) I hate drilling into anything. Yeah, especially my fingers , don't remind me.

Actually it is rather shocking how little space there is anywhere on the Vision to hide a horn, or mount the compressor, which by the way is heavy and needs a solid mounting point. The Victory engineers wasted very little space. Except in the saddle bags - apparently. After an exhaustive search I settled on the empty space where the cb/comm gear mounts for the compressor; which necessitated fabricating a shout plate mount and using a 5x25 metric cap screw to hold the bracket & the relay in place.

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From there it was a just a question of running 32ft of #14 wire 2- 8ft black wires run tandem in a single connector? to the neg terminal on the battery , 1 8ft red to the positive terminal on the battery and 1 8ft yellow (my choice so I can see it easily) to the hot lead from the original horn. This splice was little tricky since the leads are so short and the working room is so crowded.

I ran all this inside 3/8" black plastic flex to protect the wires from chaffing and terminated with waterproof spade connectors.

See attached relay diagram.

My initial idea for the trumpet mount was to hang it just below the cheese wedge pointing straight down on the left side. After a couple of failed attempts at bending some strap to match the compound angles of the cheese wedge/ coil mount I decided to look for greener (read easier) pastures.

I looked very hard for an under the fairing / up front location but the biggest problem with mounting the trumpet up front and the compressor in the back was the 1/2 second delay caused by excessively long tubing. Thankfully I discovered this problem (I was testing my wiring) before I finalized the location or wasted a lot more time trying to hide the trumpet under the front cowling. Eventually I settled on the rear motor mount; for convenience and honestly so that I could finish the job before I ran out of steam. By moving the trumpet to the rear motor mount the response to the horn button is now instantaneous.

I am planning on trying to move the trumpet to behind the saddle bag liner just to the right of the schrader valve for the rear shock next weekend because I'm not pleased by the look. I think It clashes with the modern lines of the Vision.

One thing that has always confused me is the anemic 60's VW honk that emanates from the Vision horn. I have to say, that after installing the air horn I now realize that it's not the Vision's horn that is at fault; it's the tiny little 22 gauge wires that feed the horn. NO juice - no noise.

Now that the original horn is connected with 14 gauge wire,through the new relay, to both sides of the battery the volume is really rather astonishing and in fact I may have wasted my time installing the air horn. Because they seem to be almost equal in volume. If I can find somebody with a DB meter I may try to measure the sound difference.

I am now a veritable wall of sound.

compressor mount 2.jpg (44KB - 7 downloads)

relayinst.jpg (53KB - 9 downloads)

trumpet mount.jpg (61KB - 5 downloads)