Airhorn!

UPDATE: The engine area obviously gets much hotter than a typical motorcycle.  This causes some internal components to melt a bit, changing the tough train sounding horn more to that of a clown car.  I went through a few horns and ended up removing it at annual. It was fun for a bit but the novelty wears off.

What I've been telling people about the wiring progress is it's the little victories that make me happy.  One of those was tonight when I finally had a chance to wire up the Airhorn (Or is it 'air horn'). This device has been sitting on a shelve since I bought off Amazon a number of months ago. For $50 it's one of the cheapest components you can buy for your airplane.  I went with the Marco Tornado intended for Motorcycles, Cars & Trucks... so why not an airplane?

I originally was going to hang it off the VPX, but the larger 10 amps or more 'breakers' are at a premium. I decided to go ahead and hang it off the ANL feeding the VPX.  In fact going to use this same spot to connect my Air Conditioning Components and USB chargers.  I have breakers for the AC parts but for the rest I used in-line blade fuse holders.  I went with a 20A fuse to match the instructions and 14 gauge wire for all but the switch lead.

In normal operations I'm going to trigger this via the pinky button on the stick.  However I don't know if I'll have a tendency to hit it in flight so I went ahead and used the spare switch space I had for an Airhorn switch. If I find I don't need it and then end up needing a rocker switch for something else I can just remove it from the path later.

The airhorn is physically mounted in an open space on the firewall via one bolt.  It's a 5/16 hole, which like all the holes I have, get sealed up with some fire barrier stuff before placing in the hardware.  Wiring works off a relay and because it's built for car horns which rely on some voltage you need to jumper a smaller wire off the positive input over to another tab.  Then it works like any other switch where grounding it out triggers the relay and allows the larger amperage across.

With the help of my kids I decided to let my son flip the switches and my youngest daughter film.  Here's a video of the test, glad she didn't drop her phone!  Also pardon the mess of wires, it's still a work in progress.