Annoying Horn Topic is solved

[dils]

Hi, I have a 96 850. The most annoying thing happened two days ago.
The horn honks whenever I turn the steering wheel. It's not stuck. It's starting to honk whenever I put pressure on the wheel from driving now too.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[matthew1]

By Terry Haywood:

This is from memory: There are I think 4 horn contacts inside the steering wheel. They go thru a metal frame and are held in place and insulated by red plastic around each contact. The contacts normally sit just below a piece of metal on the back side of the airbag, so when you push on the horn it touches at least one of those contacts and blasts the horn. This makes more sense when you see it.

In my car the plastic that holds one of the contacts in place broke and allowed the metal contact to move just enough to touch the metal frame, making a permanent circuit. Apparently this is not exactly your problem, I guess in yours the contacts completely fell out or otherwise are not where they need to be to complete the circuit. Anyway, in my car because the plastic insulator had not completely disintegrated I was able to epoxy the thing back in place. That was only last December - it still works, but I don't blow the horn very much.

Since you get a pathetic millisecond honk I bet at least one of your contacts is in good enough shape to glue back in. If on the other hand the plastic insulation is gone you have to decide how much fabricating you want to do to fix it.

If you want to take a stab at it here are the details (again from memory)
- disconnect the battery
- turn the wheel all the way to one side. There is a hole on the back of the wheel, inside there is a t-30 torx screw. Remove that.
- turn all the way to the other side. Remove torx screw.
- airbag is now loose. Unhook electrical connector and put airbag in a safe place. (I put mine on the kitchen counter while I worked. When I went back inside my 16 year old son was juggling the airbag. Really.)
- look for broken red plastic parts. I think they are on the back side of the frame, kind of hard to see.

If you do try to fix it I would test the connections with an ohmmeter before reassembling. If fact, before I started the job I poked around for a while with an ohmmeter figuring out how the whole thing works. Maybe it'll be obvious to you.

Standard disclaimer about airbags and such - you have to remove the airbag to do this job, it's up to you to decide whether you want to mess with that. I am not an expert at this stuff. The contributors who know more than I do say you shouldn't put an ohmmeter across the airbag contacts. And finally my own tidbit - don't let your torx bit roll down the steering column, you'll never find it.

And remember to have your radio code handy when you reattach the battery or you're in for a trip to the dealer.