Anybody know how to repair/rebuild airhorns?

[Mex-Busnut]

Dear Friends:

I hope you all are not getting tired of all my many questions! The more I study bus-ology, the more I do not know!!

I have a pair of very old air-horns, which appear to be made of brass. I hooked them up to compressed air (over 110 pounds) at my friends auto body shop, and they don't work. We took them apart, cleaned and reassembled them. No success. Any ideas? See the pictures. Or is it even worth the trouble?

Thanks in advance!

By the way, there are a ton of locomotive air-horns on Ebay. I bet a pair of those would get the attention of the 4-wheeling buzzard gizzard that cuts you off in traffic! 

[Iceni John]

I remember reading on a train horn enthusiasts website (and you think owning old buses is weird?) about the subtle art of tuning the diaphragms of real train horns.   Apparently it's not easy.   As for mounting the real thing on a road vehicle, its legality is questionable, and a UP railroad engineer told me that he thinks train horns would not work on buses or trucks because their air supply is insufficient.   Don't locomotives have about 150 PSI for their air system?      Has anyone here tried this?

John

[cody]

Jack conrad will probably join in here, he is using air horns and knows a bunch about them.

[Lin]

I have two air horns that I took off my bus.  They did not work until "tuned".  It was really a simple process with these which just involved slightly changing their length by screwing the horn section in or out of the diaphragm to get it exactly right.  It has been quite a while since a played with them, but just being off the width of a thread or two made the difference between something and nothing.  Yours may be similar. 

[JackConrad]

I have 2 pair of air horns that had laid in my father-in-laws shop for many years before I got them. One set did not work and the other soet sounded like a sick cow.  I completely dis-assembled them, cleaned all parts and re-assembled them  They had mud dauber nest inside them which prevented the diaphrams from vibrating. I had to replace a couple of the springs.  Jack

[jackhartjr]

I passed a truck a while back, he 'tooted' the horns, I thought they were in my ear, then he told me they were mounted on the right side of the truck!
Dr. Steve, if you get serious about mounting them on a bus, most folks in buses and trucks mount an air tank dedicated to them, they take a lot of air from my memory.  Jack knows best though.
Jack

[steve wardwell]

the set of horns I adjusted on our boat was not hard to do but sure did gain a lot of attention that day