Well there's been another day of constant rain after the hurricane passed through the South but on a lighter note it wasn't a heavy rain. It was slow enough that it allowed me to be able to go outside to still do a little work I had planned on doing. This time my work is centered around the vehicles being used by the two of us every day.
First up, in the S10 truck I have a car radio that doesn't have bluetooth capability due to being a slightly older radio, so in order to use the Iheartradio app through my phone and into the trucks radio, I had to use a two way male audio cord. Just recently the ole lady picked up a bluetooth FM transmitter that allows you to link your phone via bluetooth and FM transmission to an empty channel on your radio, sort of like those old audio transmitters you can hook up to your CD player back when cars didn't have CD players and it would transmit the music to some empty station like 87.5 or what not. Well anyway, the unit had stopped working and after checking my phone charger in the 12v socket, I concluded that the socket was dead. Forgetting exactly how this jack was wired up when I first got this truck, I had to do a little probing. I checked the regular cig lighter fuse and found it was good. At this point I figured that the socket is not wired in the regular electrical system, I must've ran a parallel circuit to feed the socket, so with a little tracing of the wire from the socket I ended up finding an apparently old inline fuse that was fed through the firewall on the driver's side to the wire to the socket. I didn't recall if I put that fuse block in or reused it or not, didn't care, but checking the fuse I found that the fuse was degraded enough that it came apart when I pulled on it, so I replaced it and BAM had power again. One problem was fixed. The next little issue I wanted to resolve today was hooking up the horn in the ole lady's baby SUV so as to have that option of blasting idiots on the street when they aren't paying attention. The horn pair was already installed but the device called a clock spring in the steering column was broken. The clock spring is like a slip ring that allows terminals to continue to transfer power to the loads in the steering wheel when the wheel is turned. Because of the clock spring's failure the airbag is also offline. We have yet to find a replacement clock spring as this is an oddball vehicle that doesn't carry a lot of parts supply. The only other option at this point is to just install a horn button somewhere close to the steering column and just hook that up to the horns. I bought a generic horn button off of ebay that would require drilling a hole somewhere then securing the horn switch in the hole with the included nut and hooking the wires up to it to complete the job. I had to do a little checking out around the dash area to find a suitable area to put the horn button. After a couple of areas were passed over as candidates I finally decided to just pick a bare spot in the lower dash next to the coin tray and rear wiper button. This area was easily accessible behind the panel as well after removing a lower panel from under the steering column. After drilling out the hole I then moved to the horns. Because the horns were mounted on the driver's side and the original circuit is pretty much not viable for this improvised circuitry, I decided to just pull the wire from the horn pair and run it directly to the switch through the firewall, a shorter run, without having to dig into the vehicle's original wiring. For all intents and purposes if we do manage to find a clock spring, all of this can be reversed easily and restored to regular operation. The last thing was to get a power feed to the other side of the switch/button. Luckily after looking under the dash when feeding the wire from the horns through the firewall I spotted the wire I ran that feeds the cigarette lighter socket in the center console. Since this wire is on an inline fuse in its own circuit and not part of the vehicle's original wiring, I tapped into this wire to feed the horn circuit. A simple 2 way connector allowed me to connect the horn circuit wire to the 12v socket power line. Some electrical tape to cover all bare connections and lastly buttoning up all panels and the whole job was finished. The vehicle now has a working horn once again.
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