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Your Bike needs a LOUD Italian Stebel Nautilus Horn - very effective, and cheap!

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VinceS:
I bought two of the compact ones the day after I posted this, to put in our cars. They arrived 7am overnight from Qld and I installed them same day. Bit tricky in the Subaru as there is naf all room but sorted a bracket to hang it in the front next to the std horn. We love them! The noise is certainly loud and the already loud standard horns cannot be heard under the Stebel, which it is actually a quite friendly civilised kind of noise so we have no drama using it whenever needed! Stebel have perfected “instant on” so there is no delayed response.And yes, the compact ones would be easier to fit on the bike than the effort I went to before as detailed below.

I am attaching pics of the Subaru install as it shows what can be done fairly easily in a tight space. The bracket is cut down from something I had left over from an earlier project, these are cheaply available from Bunnings. The slot, by the way, was because originally I was going to mount it a bit to the left over where a clip for the grill is, but it wouldn't fit for I-now-don't-remember-what reason. So all it really needed was a right-angle bracket that you drill holes in to suit exactly what the best mounting position is. The battery is nearby so easy to run a feed from existing horn to the relay mounted on the wall next to the battery, and bring back the activated supply from the relay. Great safety initiative and cheap and fairly easy to do!

VinceS:
Yep, clear those texting / mobile using tin-tops with a single blast. Stop them arguing with their friends and get them to pay attention while you pass safely by. Or let them know they are getting into SMIDSY territory - they may not see you but oh boy they will know you're there!!!! Convince that errant roo now is not the time to jump onto the road, or hurry off it if they already have....

The SINGLE SECOND MOST IMPORTANT SAFETY IMPROVEMENT YOU CAN MAKE TO YOUR BIKE (rider training is #1) is here, and has been since 1955 apparently - but I just noticed it a couple of weeks ago! Well made Italian product. They're even cheap! $50 for a black one and $55 for a red one; chrome is $70 - see here for details http://www.ebay.com.au/dsc/m.html?LH_TitleDesc=1&_ssn=onlineautoparts&_nkw=stebel.

I didn't previously (to now) realise there was a compact version and if I had that would have made the job much easier. Fitting the regular horn to my ST4S was quite a labour of love, but I wanted to find a way that it was securely held on, wouldn't rub on anything, DIDN'T NEED THE FAIRING CUT and could be easily enough removed and replaced for servicing. I accepted a compromise on the last point in that I cable-tied the bracket on rather than figure out a bolting method - so 3 new cable ties whenever I want to remove it, no big deal! I also rounded off one corner of the horn so it couldn't rub on an adjacernt water hose. The "compact" version of the horn is 10-20mm smaller in the main dimensions and fitting that one would have been a snack - great knowledge to have up front, but alas it's hindsight for me; at least you get to use it!

The piece of metal I used as a bracket was a bit of left over floating floor trim - cheap enough to buy a length from Bunnings if you go that way too. The reason the bracket needed to be like I did it was because the fairing wraps tidily under the frame tube that I wanted to cable tie the horn to. So this stuff-around solution was because I didn't want to cable tie the horn directly to the frame then cut a bit of fairing away. Would've been far easier if I had, but I got stubborn and sorted it! Note I cut off and slotted the original horn mounting leg to cable tie the new bracket to the horn securely. I also didn't use the unsealed relay that comes with the horn as I preferred to use a sealed waterproof version which I think I got from Jaycar a while back. Note EVERY termination is soldered; crimping is poison on a bike as they all fail a couple of years or so down the track - don't do it to yourself!

I got the power supply off the existing fuse box, using the 15A horn (etc) outlet which I upgraded to a 30A fuse and then the master increased to 40A as this horn will pull 18A and I don't want that to cause an issue. Also I have heated grips & GPS on this circuit, being all non-essential-to-progress equipment that I can still get home without. If I was going to blast the horn for lengthy times (eg several minutes) I would upgrade the supply harness too, but can't see it getting prolonged enough use that heating up the wiring becomes an issue. Of course you could wire it back to the battery with an independent fuse; there is some merit to this option - especially if you are the kind that likes to ride alongside a hands-on mobile user and prevent them from having any kind of conversation until they get it and pull over - does that ever happen?

I relocated the existing horn and tuned it up via the screw on the back so it makes a really loud noise too because, if the air horn compressor ever cacks itself, I want the original horn to still work as a standby. So they both sound at once now, but believe me I cannot hear the slightest bit of the OEM horn under the blast that the Nautilus makes; it's pretty impressive I gotta say!

I just did a check of the legal requirements - item 33 from here is the relevant rule. The relevant bits are these:
(1) A motor vehicle must be fitted with at least 1 horn or other device that can give sufficient audible warning to other road users of the approach or position of the vehicle.
    (5)     The device must not be louder than is necessary so the driver, and a person near the vehicle, can hear the device when it is operating.

Well I have proved time and again that a standard horn is not sufficiently loud to head off a typical impending SMIDSY event so there will be no issue there. I note musical air horns are defined as "repeater horns" and are hence illegal, so don't go there! But multi-tone single note air horns are fine within the above. Read section 20 in ADR 42 for all the details.

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