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Horn on fire, why? And other good news

matthon

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62 Dart, American Auto Wire harness, fusebox, etc.
Comes with a horn relay, power, green horn wire, ground to column harness.

Testing everything, going well, almost forgot to check horn before calling it a night.

It was supposed to go beep, or some form of weak old horn struggling to come alive sound.
I got flames and smoke from under horn button, fun, disconnected battery.

Wire from mount only wire damaged.
Pulled column harness, checked from column to relay to horns.

Ground wire at relay, possible it was not fully seated, so I pulled it out and made sure. Also made connections at horns more better by not much at all.
Other than that I'm at a loss.

Why would the ground wire in the steering wheel mount burn up?

Also, stop lamp switch was bad, so I pulled the wires, plugged into a new one, not mounted, just in my hand, worked fine, but wires seemed to get a little warm.
Is this normal, or am I paranoid due to aforementioned burning wires?

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Could the black and green be in the wrong spots, that simple?

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Typically the wire in the column grounds the relay coil pulling in the contact creating a closed circuit between the battery & horn.. The coil acts as a limiter on the amperage flowing through the wire.... That wire attempted to pass a whole lotta amps, more than it should have... Either the horn relay is bad & creates a short path from the battery to the horn switch (not likely) or the wires are pinned into the horn relay wrong again creating a path for battery voltage to feed directly to ground through that wire.....
 
Sounds like you've already got it figured out... Brake light wires? probably paranoid but keep an eye on it...
 
View is from connector side, opposite wire entry. Well, I got all but one right!

Still paranoid on stop switch.

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The black horn wire should go to ground. You apparently have it hook to power/hot and when you pressed the horn button it grounded the hot creating a short. Do you have power/hot and ground hooked up backward?
 
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