Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Horn replacement: BMW F800GS and a Stebel Magnum

My BMW stock horn sounds crap. It reminds me of a Vespa or some Kymco scooter noise. Any car going into my lane hears that, and just keeps coming, not a lot of respect.

That was ¨OK¨until I rode a Harley. The air horn they have sound amazing - a profound loud and powerful toot, for a car sounds something like an 18 wheeler coming at you full blast.

So I´ve been looking into how to put a harley air horn on my GS. After some investigating ran into some roadblocks, like the can BUS but more importantly the size of the thing - where & how to mount it on the bike without adding a wierd appendix...

But I found the Stebel Magnum horn:
Which almost fits into the same place as the stock GS horn, and you can connect directly to the CAN bus. This is how it sounds:


Replacement wasn´t that easy, mainly because I was missing a torque wrench extender and couldn´t get the original bolts off. Other than that, pretty straightforward - just needs some pacience in getting it exactly into where the original is. Here a timelapse of the mount:

No car will ignore me now :-)