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One of the many popular things to customize on a car is the horn. Factory
horns don't do the job sometimes. Bad ones just sound like somebody stepped
on a rubber duck, hardly effective for getting attention in this noisy world.
Some people go for maximum decibel air horns, and some folks like the more
musical ones that actually pump air. I used to have a huge air horn from
an old Freightliner truck that scared the Bejezus out of people. I never
should have sold that unit. At one point I had the thing in a hotrod Mustang
with a racing exhaust that sounded like doomsday when I decelerated hard
in first gear, and let me tell you, the combination always cleared those
pesky pedestrians away. I never ran over any deaf people, though.
Although it's probably illegal, like everything else, a lot of people in
Manila have opted for sirens and revolving red lights. If you want some,
they are available for not that much at many car accessory shops. One of
my friends got one, and Boy says that it worked pretty good on the highway,
but he got mixed results in the city. He left it on the roof one time by
mistake and it got stolen. He's looking for one of those blue strobe units
like US police use now. Yeah, some of my friends are jerks.
Anyway, I rigged up something even more effective. I used off-the shelf
consumer electronics and built the horn from Hell. Works like this: three
massive Army surplus15" indoor/outdoor PA speakers wired up to a pair
of cheap 500 watt power plate amplifiers made by some Chinese company I'll
probably never hear from again. They probably only deliver a distorted 200
watts, but they do the job. I mounted two facing forward under the hood
and one in the trunk right in the middle of the spare tire well. I insulated
that one really well so I don't go deaf myself when I use it.
Now here's the good part. I rewired a digital message unit I found in a
surplus shop that I assume used to be part of a phone system. When I got
it, a snotty sounding British woman recited messages like "that line
is undah repair," and "Sorry, all circuits are busy now. Please
try your call laytah." I probed and sure enough it had "dahling"
on the end of that particular message, but I guess it never gets played.
It was probably stolen by some disgruntled PLDT employee, but heck, I didn't
steal it. Anyway, I hooked it up to some digital musical equipment I still
have from my rock and roll days, and re-recorded the messages with some
nice sampled pieces of my own.
My fave is one I actually had to pay to orchestrate. I paid a truck driver
to brutally stomp on the brakes a couple of times while I and some friends
recorded it from my car. There's nothing like the sound of an eighteen wheeler
loaded with steel bridge parts locking up it's wheels from 140 kph. I went
to Subic and recorded a tugboat's horn. I went to UP Medical School and
recorded the sound of a hip bone cracking. Rented a tape and sampled the
sound Darth Vader's star fighter made when Han Solo shot it. I also recorded
a few screams from some Alfred Hitchcock films and blended them into a truly
horrific maelstrom. Oh, and there's some mundane ones like my friend Rocky's
Dobermans and Rottweilers growling and some jarring dissonant tones I invented
with a synthesizer. Made up a little control panel for the ten sounds and
bolted it to my dashboard with four two inch wood screws. Spray painted
it black.
Now, I still have my regular horn, but with a flick of a switch, I can produce
sounds that, if they don't clear the whole roadway, at least make things
happen. Flick another switch, and I can get annoying people off my tail.
I have to admit that when I first tested the system, I needed to make some
other unanticipated modifications to my car like more soundproofing and
a heavy duty battery, but it's working great now.
Errant busses are especially susceptible to the eighteen wheeler sound,
I've noticed, because it sounds like something that might actually manage
to crush enough of the bus to destroy the driver's compartment. There are
just certain sounds that everyone knows, like the sound of a pump action
shotgun loading an oversize 10 gauge shell into the chamber. Sometimes people
need to be reminded of their mortality to shock them into actually thinking,
instead of acting like self-centered robots.
I don't use the system that much, honestly, but when I do, my passengers
are always thrilled. Everybody wants a system now, but I'm not excited about
the prospect of doing it again, since doing all the wiring was kind of a
pain in the butt. And the truth is the fun was in the inspiration of the
first system anyway. But I did come across a surplus German V-plow for snow
removal that I'm considering mounting to a truck, just for the hell of it.©1996
Peczon
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