1988 Caprice: Bypassing Horn Relay?

What is wrong with the present system? If it is the switch, buy the switch and replace it. If it is the relay... or the horn... just replace the broken part. The shop's cost is almost entirely labor anyway. Why make a jump to an appearance on 'there I fixed it' ?

That's an 88 so the horn switch is REAL simple and easy to get to. Remove the screws that hold the horn pad to the steering wheel. Right behind it you will find the horn contacts. 99% of them are nothing more than a round plastic ring with a copper contact that contacts to a spring loaded contact. Most of the failures are that the small tab that holds the contact in breaks off. Might take you 20 minutes to do this in a driveway with a screwdriver.

And burn up in very short order. The horn has a relay for two reasons. One is to allow ground switching through a simple switch in the horn pad.

OK, I took Steve's advice about removing the horn cover. Easy enough, just 2 screws with 5/16" bolt-type heads on the underside of the steering wheel.

The plastic tabs with contacts he mentioned were not the problem. My ohm meter showed the switch circuit itself worked fine. The actual problem apparently was the 4" black wire which connects the horn switch assembly to the steering column. The wire has a round contact on the end, with a spring similar to the one ballpoint pens use before the contact, and a short round plastic tube behind the spring. The wire is meant to be inserted into a plastic-lined hole in the steering column and when the horn cover is tightened down it pushes on the short plastic tube, which pushes on the spring, which keeps the contact on the end of the wire in firm contact with the contact in the bottom of the hole on the top of the steering column. The horn would sound when I stuck a grounded wire down the hole in the steering column, so I knew the wiring from there to the horn relay was good, and my ohm meter had proven the switch contacts were fine. The only thing left was the black wire's spring-loaded contact. Somehow it had lost contact with the bottom of the hole, maybe simply due to the screws which hold the switch cover tightly against the top of the spring loosening a little over the years. Anyway, I put the wire back in the hole and carefully put the horn cover over top of it, tightened the screws down and VIOLA, horn works like new.

By the way, both the aftermarket horn relay my neighbor bought at AutoZone and the external horn pushbutton switch he bought at O'reillys were both bad. We tried it a couple of times: the horn wouldn't work with the aftermarket relay installed but worked fine with the 23 year old original in there. Go figure. And my ohm meter showed that when the external pushbutton switch he bought was pushed, there was no continuity between the input and output contacts. Chinese crap!

The plastic sleeve that the contact goes through should have a small molded in pin that sticks out of the side. You line that up with a slot in the plastic insulator and turn it to lock it in place. (Works just like the bayonet base on an 1156/7 bulb)

That piece where you stuck the screwdriver down to make the horn work is the rotating contact. The black wire with the round contact rubs on that and connects the switches in the wheel cover to the rest of the vehicle.

I would pop the cover back off and check to see if the lock pin is there. If it isn't the easy solution is a small dab of epoxy applied so it goes between the two plastic pieces. OR you can use a soldering gun to melt the two together.

Glad you got it working either way.