CT944

Since I bought the car, the horn doesn't work. I removed the steering wheel cover from my 3 spoke and the black wire is attached. The 2 horns under the driver side fog light are hooked up...to a black/yellow and brown wire.

What am I missing?

seb928s

Have you checked the grounds and the fuse?

kennycoulter

mine is on and off....last time it worked it was very warm outside. i have had my steering wheel off to do my speedo. i am thinking the copper? ring may need scuffed up. i thought it was the contacts on the horn pad itself, but a jumper wire from the horn wire to the contacts didnt work. so maybe it might be your ring in the backer plate. i also have the ugly (to me) 3 spoker.

Luis de Prat

CT944, there's a ground strap from the manual steering rack to the crossmember. You'll need to get under the car, remove the engine protection pan if you have it on, and poke around the rack & pinion to find it. It could be loose, or have a bad connection. Undo it, clean it up, and reconnect.

Kenny, the on-and-off indicates there is excessive play in your intermediate steering shaft. I had the same problem and fixed it by replacing mine with a better used one. The horn is grounded through the steering shaft, so when the U-joints become too loose, the horn works intermittently.

Unfortunately the manual shafts are very expensive new and not easy to find in decent condition since the cars are getting old and up in miles. You can check on eBay but most of the shafts they're selling are for power steering cars, and are about 1cm shorter.

If you have power steering, they're pretty abundant and I happen to have a nice one. PM me if you're interested.

dberkstr

Are you sure the horns themselves actually work? I replaced one or both of mine. They were loaded with rust. Try removing the leads and get a 12V battery and connecting them up directly. New aftermarket horns are not that expensive.

Luis de Prat

Good point. Don't overlook the obvious!

CT944

I have a Bosch horn which was mounted to the passenger side strut housing. I also have 2 horns under the driver side fog light.

Which is my primary horn?? If it is the one mounted to the strut tower, what color wires should be attached??

Luis de Prat

There should be 2 stock horns (high tone & low tone) mounted on the driver side, just behind the radiator. Per the wiring diagrams in Haynes for the 1983 944, there should be a brown ground wire to each horn, the horns should also have a yellow/black wire between them, and a red/black wire back to the wiring harness (i.e. horn relay).

Strut tower horn should be a car alarm siren.

cpt_koolbeenz

You gotta push it...

NZ951

My twin horns were always unreliable, some times would go, sometimes would not. I deleted my factory alarm and used the siren from that in place of the twin horns. Its lighter and seems to work more consistently.

Renn 951

Mine apparently has the same problem as described by Luis. I dropped the car off at the shop last week for a pre-track tech inspection and asked them to check the horn while it was there. I figured the contacts under the buttons on the steering wheel were just worn out, but the shop called back and said it was due to a faulty ground caused by the steering coupling having too much wear.

The part is $300, and I expect there will be several hours of labor involved. They said the 951 is a little harder to repair than a 944 due to the configuration, so it didn't get finished last week. I'll pick the car up tomorrow and find out how big a hit the wallet takes on this one!

seb928s

Yea it's a lot of work getting to it but it's do-able. Probably going to cost you nicely. Also while I was swapping out from PS to manual rack I could still use my horn without the rack in the car. I just wanted to check it was weird I thought I couldn't do that.

Luis de Prat

Could this be because the car could still ground itself through the steel jackstands?