So... the horn. Meep meep and all that mess.
Standard disclaimers apply - I will not be held liable if you cannot execute this on your own without it killing your children or burning your house down. If you have questions, ask, google, so forth...
The horn on the CBR is fairly loud, it's just not much of a "commands attention" sort of frequency. It sounds like a small car or motorcycle... not something that should be avoided when it honks.
Most all of my bikes, I do this swap, someone asked if I'd make a thread, so here's the thread.
Things you'll need:
- Basic mechanics tools (10mm socket, combo wrench, and 5mm allen wrench)
- Various wiring supplies, such as butt splices, 1/4" quick connect female crimps, and a ring crimp.
- Crimpers
- Wire
- An inline fuse holder and a fuse for it.
- A High/Low pair of 132dB Freeway Blaster horns
- cable ties
- relay
- Um, maybe some other stuff.
Strip the fairing off the left side of the bike, take the pillion/cowl off to expose the seat bolts and remove the seat to expose the battery. If you need details on how to do this, I'm not providing them. You *MUST* know how to maintain your bike, and how to pull the fairings off is pretty much the beginning of any and all procedures involving the engine. Look elsewhere for the play-by-play if you need it.
Disconnect the negative battery lead any time you're getting ready to do electrical work.
Pull the fuse box up so you can get a driver onto the positive terminal, and install a ring crimped end on the inline fuse holder and put it on the terminal and screw all that mess back down and replace the bike's fusebox back into its holder.
Attach a long piece of red wire to the other end of the fuse holder. You can use butt splices here, but I chose instead to solder and heatshrink the connection.
Pull enough wire, being careful with the routing of the wire to avoid pinching between things that could chafe the wire or some such (this is really kinda why we have the fuse there, in case something goes wrong) to reach maybe a foot or more past the stock horn location, this should give you enough extra to tie the wire down in a decent routing, etc etc, yadda yadda.
The horns usually come with some hardware kit with them that includes tabs and short wire jumpers so that you can ground one of the two terminals to the bike's frame... Even though this isn't the orientation I ended up using, it looks kind of like this:
Then comes the difficult part... figuring out how to get the horns to fit. One of these horns is larger than the stock horn, and we now have two.
I ended up mounting one more or less in the stock location, and bent brackets around to get the second one next to the engine. I'm not terribly happy with the setup... but it's working so far.
Then, you just wire it up... relays can be confusing, but once you realize they're just a switch that is switched electrically by a switch, it kinda makes sense.
Here's what the terminals on the relay are:
So, we connect the wires that went to the original horn to the 85/86 terminals. Polarity really doesn't matter here, we're energizing a coil. Then, we connect our lead that we ran from our battery and our horns to the 30/51 and 87 terminals. Again, doesn't really matter which way they go here, one is one side of the switch and the other is the other side of the switch. When we apply voltage to 85/86, the switch closes between 30/51 and 87. Really simple stuff, actually.
Then, we take the output from the relay and splice two wires together into one (yeah, i didn't get a pic of that) and run those to the horns.
Use cable ties to tidy it all up and hold it in place, add your fuse to the fuse holder, re-connect the negative brake line, turn the key and watch out for your ears when you hit the horn button.
The difference in sound (doesn't really do anything for showing any difference in loudness):
Standard disclaimers apply - I will not be held liable if you cannot execute this on your own without it killing your children or burning your house down. If you have questions, ask, google, so forth...
The horn on the CBR is fairly loud, it's just not much of a "commands attention" sort of frequency. It sounds like a small car or motorcycle... not something that should be avoided when it honks.
Most all of my bikes, I do this swap, someone asked if I'd make a thread, so here's the thread.
Things you'll need:
- Basic mechanics tools (10mm socket, combo wrench, and 5mm allen wrench)
- Various wiring supplies, such as butt splices, 1/4" quick connect female crimps, and a ring crimp.
- Crimpers
- Wire
- An inline fuse holder and a fuse for it.
- A High/Low pair of 132dB Freeway Blaster horns
- cable ties
- relay
- Um, maybe some other stuff.
Strip the fairing off the left side of the bike, take the pillion/cowl off to expose the seat bolts and remove the seat to expose the battery. If you need details on how to do this, I'm not providing them. You *MUST* know how to maintain your bike, and how to pull the fairings off is pretty much the beginning of any and all procedures involving the engine. Look elsewhere for the play-by-play if you need it.
Disconnect the negative battery lead any time you're getting ready to do electrical work.
Pull the fuse box up so you can get a driver onto the positive terminal, and install a ring crimped end on the inline fuse holder and put it on the terminal and screw all that mess back down and replace the bike's fusebox back into its holder.
Attach a long piece of red wire to the other end of the fuse holder. You can use butt splices here, but I chose instead to solder and heatshrink the connection.
Pull enough wire, being careful with the routing of the wire to avoid pinching between things that could chafe the wire or some such (this is really kinda why we have the fuse there, in case something goes wrong) to reach maybe a foot or more past the stock horn location, this should give you enough extra to tie the wire down in a decent routing, etc etc, yadda yadda.
The horns usually come with some hardware kit with them that includes tabs and short wire jumpers so that you can ground one of the two terminals to the bike's frame... Even though this isn't the orientation I ended up using, it looks kind of like this:
Then comes the difficult part... figuring out how to get the horns to fit. One of these horns is larger than the stock horn, and we now have two.
I ended up mounting one more or less in the stock location, and bent brackets around to get the second one next to the engine. I'm not terribly happy with the setup... but it's working so far.
Then, you just wire it up... relays can be confusing, but once you realize they're just a switch that is switched electrically by a switch, it kinda makes sense.
Here's what the terminals on the relay are:
So, we connect the wires that went to the original horn to the 85/86 terminals. Polarity really doesn't matter here, we're energizing a coil. Then, we connect our lead that we ran from our battery and our horns to the 30/51 and 87 terminals. Again, doesn't really matter which way they go here, one is one side of the switch and the other is the other side of the switch. When we apply voltage to 85/86, the switch closes between 30/51 and 87. Really simple stuff, actually.
Then, we take the output from the relay and splice two wires together into one (yeah, i didn't get a pic of that) and run those to the horns.
Use cable ties to tidy it all up and hold it in place, add your fuse to the fuse holder, re-connect the negative brake line, turn the key and watch out for your ears when you hit the horn button.
The difference in sound (doesn't really do anything for showing any difference in loudness):