Here's a strange one

[King]

Description: with every cylinder fire a good strong beep from the horn!

Post by King on Jun 30, 2003, 7:05pm

Here's a good one.

On my 51 Pan, I had a binding problem with my manual advance/retard so loosened up the cable cover took off the handlebars pulled the spiral, extracted the offending wire, and installed a new one. Put the rig back together and the advance/retard worked just fine.
Now comes the stange bit. I turned on the ignition and was greeted with a short bip from the horn. I didn't think too much of it and started the bike. Then to my surprise, with every cylinder fire a good strong beep from the horn! Needless to say it didn't run very well with horn and ignition competing for juice and I shut her down fast. I disconnected the horn and got rid of the problem.
But what could have caused it? I think the horn button on the bars is just a simple ground to complete the horn circuit and thus, if I had somehow exposed its wire while working with the bars and "shorted" it out, the horn (I think) should sound continuously as soon as the ignition is on and not beep the way it did.

Any ideas??

King

Post by 57Kicker on Jul 1, 2003, 1:06am

Could come in handy if you had a reverse...it would sound like a back up alarm! ??? (sorry, :-[ couldn't resist)
That is a good one. My first thought was the bared wire idea you had. but as you said it didn't. seem to make sense.
I'll have to watch this one.

p.s. sounds like a nice ride King. Powder coated chrome sounds like it would be a cool idea. I was thinking of powder coating only the headlight on my 57. My bike is mostly black and white with only a bit of chrome. I will try to get a pic posted soon.

cheers!

Post by 59pan on Jul 2, 2003, 3:16am

Hey 57
I don't know much but it doesn't sound like a ground problem to me. Take your horn switch out and get the volt meter. use some alligator clips and kick over the bike. See if you are getting voltage feedback through the switch. If you are trace the wire to find out why.
Just my 2cents.

Post by King on Jul 9, 2003, 2:01am

Well I never truly solved the mystery but fixed the problem. I took out the horn button wire and as suspected found that my moving the advance/retard wire sheath around had stripped off a bit of the electrical tape that had covered the splice I made to keep the old horn button when I rewired the bike a few years ago. It was intermittently grounding the horn button wire thus the beeping (I think). I retaped the splice and wired the horn back up and problem gone.
Speaking of horns an old rider taught me years ago to use the horn to check the generator/rate of charge. When the genny's charging up to snuff the horn puts out a good high pitched bleat. At idle a much lower tone etc. When you get sort of a strained grunt you are low on juice.

[JamesD]

Pity you had to fix the horn set-up. You could have made her earn her keep like, take her to some swap meets and as a side show, fire her up to do some busking. JamesD