Horn issues, Subaru Legacy Outback 1999

[adebowski]

Hey everyone,

I have been scouring the Subaru forums for help on this and so far pieces of information have helped me put together a bit of the puzzle but it is still not solved.

Background: I have a 1999 Legacy Outback Wagon with the following symptoms:

Horn does not work (more about this in a second)
Cruise Control does not work (light on the dash turns on but it doesn't engage)

The horn:

Here is what I know so far:

With the 20A fuse in and the relay plugged in the horn turns on and stays on without me pressing the horn button on the wheel. But it is only the passenger side horn.

The 20A fuse blows every so often if I leave it in and the horn is stuck on.

If I unplug the horn, the 20A fuse does not blow out but as soon as I put in a new fuse I can hear the relay click on and it does not click off, again nothing is pressed.

I checked to see if there was power going to the horns and they both get power that is on constantly if the fuse and relay are in. This leads me to believe that the driver side horn does not work at all since it gets power but doesn't sound on like the passenger side.

So my thought is there may be a short somewhere or there is a problem with grounding. I thought the horns were grounded by their attachment to the chassis but that is just a guess.

Here is where it gets weird. After doing some research it started to sound like the clock spring (which it still may be). So I wanted to see if the relay would click on when I put the 20A fuse in like it normally does IF I also had unhooked all the connectors coming from the steering column. So I disconnected them all and then put in the fuse and of course the relay clicked and the horn stuck on.

I am somewhat lost from here. I will be the first to admit I do not know a lot about fixing cars but can generally piece it together with some instructions.

So my questions now are:
1.) Does the connection go Horn Switch-->Clock Spring-->Fuse-->Relay-->Horn or am I missing something? If it does go that way and I disconnected the Clock Spring does that prove the problem is between the Fuse to Horn wiring?
I have tried using a known defect free Relay and it was the same issue.
2.) How do I go about testing the clock spring without removing it from the car (don't want to get a new one if I don't have to)?
3.) Would putting in 2 horns that are known to have no defects rule out the horns as the culprits of the issue?
4.) Any other ideas for what trips the relay on and causes it stay open?

As an aside my other car is a 1998 Legacy Outback Wagon that has nothing wrong with it so I am just using it as my baseline while looking for things wrong in the 1999 and swapping parts to isolate issues.

Final comment. This is all just to pass a safety inspection the sole failure point of which is the horn.

Thanks for any help or insight.

Arthur

[ctbrighton]

i'll try with what I see in the wiring diagram...

horn relay is ground triggered, horns are self-grounding.

power supply goes like this

1.FUSE BOX fuse number 12 Red Yellow wire to relay
2.HORN RELAY RED YELLOW +12v from power supply
Red GREEN ground trigger
RED BLUE 12V to horns
3.HORNS

see if you can cut the ground trigger at the relay, plug everything in and see what happens. If horns don't turn on constantly, do yourself a favor and run a new wire from the relay to a good ground and it should turn on the horns when it is grounded. if it works good then you have a problem in the ground trigger between the relay and the horn.

if you run a new wire to the ground trigger on the clockspring side of the connector and cut the ground trigger before that connector, and it works good, then leave it and assume there's a short between the relay and clockspring connector.

if after still attaching a separate new wire on the clockspring side of the connector you get constant horn on, the clockspring is probably bad. good luck

[ctbrighton]

aaaand after re-reading your post it sounds like the short is infact between the horn relay and the connector going to the clockspring. cut the ground trigger at the relay and run a new wire to the clockspring side of the connector. don't forget to cut the ground trigger on the "relay side" of the clockspring connector.

the ground trigger on the connector for the clockspring should be pin #4, or red with a blue stripe

[adebowski]

As an aside would there be a benefit to replacing or at least cleaning up all the grounding wires under the hood. I just looked at them and a bunch of them look pretty dirty or gunked up. Not sure where they originate from though.

[ctbrighton]

not going to solve your horn issue, but it will not hurt the car one bit.