FITTING AN AIR HORN

I recently had to replace the headlamp relay which meant removing all the front fairings, so I decided to change the oil and filters while I was at it.

After ordering the filters, I discovered that the bike was fitted with a K&N filter so I’d wasted money straight away!! Grrrr! ?

Anyway, service completed, I thought I’d try to fit the AIR-HORN that I’d had stuck in the garage for ages. I mounted it on the left side of the frame and found a threaded hole there as if it was made for the job. Once in place, I slid the front left fairing in place and it SEEMED to look okay, so I took a chance and carried on with the installation.

I ran all the wiring and connected it up to a relay. Tried the horns (I left the original connected too) and WOW!!! LOUD!

Great, so now I can put everything back together and be happy. But no, it didn’t work out that way sadly. Once the fuel tank panels were in place, I soon realised that I would struggle to get the left fairing to mate up perfectly to the left tank panel. ? ? ?

If they used traditional fairing bolts it would have been fine, but as we all know, the VFR1200 uses fancy clips and tabs, so as a result, there was a bit of a gap showing 

If I physically held the panels together, it was fine, but there’s no way to tighten anything up to keep them like this. So I had two choices - remove the fairings and unwire the air-horn or leave it as is.

Well in the end, I decided to keep my wonderfully LOUD horns and applied a little Gorilla Tape temporarily and then a couple of weeks later I made a short metal bracket which moved the horn to the left a couple of inches. That allowed the fairing to fit nicely into place without any issues.

I should point out that it’s a GOOD IDEA to place an inline-fuse to the airhorn but don’t be tempted to place the fuse behind the fairing or you’ll have a hell of a job on your hands if the fuse blows!! Instead, run it back to the under-seat area and put it there for easy fuse-changing. It draws a LOT of current, so I used a 25A fuse.

JUST REMEMBER – the horn location was another couple of inches to the left of this (using a metal strap).