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Re: Help with horn.... S70 1998

Hope this helps: (plucked from Swedish bricks mailing list)

Repairing horn switch

There are 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 will make sense when you see it.

In my car the plastic that holds one of the contacts in place cracked and allowed the metal contact to move just enough to touch the metal frame, making a permanent circuit. Thus the horn was always on. Most reports I've seen say the horn doesn't work right, I guess in that case the contacts completely fall out or otherwise are not where they need to be to complete the circuit.

Details for the fix (from memory)

- make sure you have your radio code

- disconnect the battery

- turn the wheel 90 degrees one side. There is a hole on the back of the wheel, inside the hole is a t-30 torx screw. Remove it.

- turn wheel 90 degrees to the other side. Remove torx screw.

- airbag is now loose. Unhook electrical connector and put airbag in a safe place.

NOTE: Do not turn on the key with the airbag removed. It will set an SRS

fault code, you'll need a dealer to clear the code.

- Poke around for a while with an ohmmeter to figure out how the whole thing

works. Maybe it'll be obvious to you. This is not necessary for the fix.

- look for broken red plastic parts. They are on the back side of the frame, kind of hard to see, you can see the contacts sticking through toward you. If they all look good try jiggling them to find a loose one.

I used epoxy to glue the broken part in place. It still had plastic around the edge of the contact so I didn't need to insulate it from the frame. If the insulating plastic around the edge is gone you would need to put something around it for insulation. I didn't need to do this but imagine shrink wrap or lots of other things would work.

I would test the connections with an ohmmeter before the epoxy dries, especially making sure the contact is isolated from the frame you glued it to. Otherwise the horn will be on all the time.

If you can't glue/fix the broken part and your problem is the horn honks all the time I've heard you can remove the problem contact or I suppose tape it up and stick it out of the way. Then your horn will work on the remaining corners.

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 Haynes manual shows how to remove the airbag in the section on removing the steering wheel. Knowledgable people say you shouldn't put an ohmmeter across the airbag contacts - the small voltage from the meter will cause the bag to go off. And finally my own tidbit - don't let your torx bit roll down the top of the steering column, you'll never find it.







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