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Electric horns...polarity?


ejparrott

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I'm helping a friend with his IIa rewire that has standard car horns of the spiral trumpet type (reasonable sounding for a change)...Whilest talking to him about all the work that needed doing, he mentioned that the horns had packed up. He remember that he'd had to insulate them from the bodywork, and suspected they must have come off a positive earth car, and guessed the reason for failure being the insulation failing.

However.....

I've took them off the rad panel and tested them on the bench tonight...after a bit of a scrub to get clean contacts they appear to be working again, but they don't seem to mind whether they are +ve earth or -ve earth....is this normal? Will they function both ways? It may be that after a damn good scrub to get the thick layer of years of grime off, and '+' or '-' symbol may appear next to the single solitary 6.3mm male spade fitting....just wondered if anyone knew the answer already?

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From memory they are just an electromagnet attached to bit of thin metal, when the magnet pulls it also breaks a contact that switches the magnet off, then it remakes contact and the cycle starts again...... this all happens very quickly and this is what makes the sound. So to cut a long story short ..... it's a magnet so doesn't care about polarity. HTH

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