So, the other day I took a quick trip up to the Niagara Gorge at
Artpark State Park, Lewiston, NY.
Lewiston, and while I was there, I sounded the horns. It was pretty empty while I was there, but there were some people with dogs (who were supposed to be on lead, but weren’t), and a bunch of wildlife, so I didn’t want to go too wild with the horns.
The Canadian side of the Gorge.
The area is awesome, if you’ve never been there, as the Niagara River has carved the gorge with a constantly ‘advancing’ set of falls, of which our iconic Niagara Falls is only the latest version.
Some of the top half of the stratigraphy of the Gorge.
With the dramatic drop of the cut, you can see the whole stratigraphic column of the bedrock exposed.
But at any rate, here’s a clipped version (due to upload size restrictions) of the recording of both the air chimes and the Supertyfon. Enjoy!
The other sounding unit was the air horn. This was a massive cast aluminum fixture with three bells of varying lengths, producing three different notes. While several of the Leslie horns produced nice chords, the combination of horns chosen for the Conrail locomotives in the 1970’s produced a more discordant sound, likely to attract more attention. The Leslie SuperTyfon RS-3L is one of them, the horns producing the C, D#, and A notes.
The ‘S’ is for the SuperTyfon style of horns, the ‘R’ is for the the spike-backed chamber, which helped to make the horns more dependable and durable, the “3” indicates that the horn has three bells on the manfold, and the “L” indicates that the three bell combination for this horn is bells 25, 31, and 44 (C, D#, and A, respectively). Given that the spike-backed chambers were released in 1977, and the ones on this horn indicate that they are amongst the earliest runs or production, I’m guessing a late 1970’s-very early 1980’s construction for this horn.
The SuperTyfon horn, still with the Conrail blue on it.
When I got it from my father, it still retained some of the ‘Conrail blue’ paint, but so much was worn away that it looked rather shabby.
My make-shift blasting box is basically a tarp and card table – important to collect the media, both for re-use and to keep it from going everywhere!
I decided to clean and repaint it, and started with a sand-blasting with the black diamond grit in my little air blaster.
Post-blasting, the horns are a nice, clean aluminum.
The end result was really nice clean aluminum, and actually exposed the original plate manufacturer’s plate that had been painted over.
Since I was repainting it, I decided to be a little fancier than just giving it one color, deciding on a gloss bright red for the bell interiors and rims, and a gloss black for the rest of the unit. This went pretty well, with only a little crackling of the black paint where it went over the red, but I sanded this and put more coats of black on and minimized it considerably.
The red paint is already on, and the tape is on so I can spray the black on and leave the red rims.
Spraying the black paint on the horns. The tape is holding plastic bags that will keep the insides red.
Installation here, though was more complex than for the chime, due to the fact that the horn had to be mounted up on the roof behind the first support, which meant that it would be under the metal ceiling and need a 90 degree barb fixture that would have to be put in place before the four bolts holding the manifold down could be put in place. Luckily, I was able to ply a friend with some homebrew and have him stand on the hood of the bus, holding the horn and wrenches in place while I worked from inside to secure things.
(This may sound like I was taking the easier job, but realize that only the front edge of the metal ceiling was loose and the area between it and the roof was full of yellow fiberglass insulation that the ceiling plate kept pushing up while I was trying to work in there. Plenty itchy work.)
Each of the four bolt-holes, as well as the air-line fixture were surrounded with the butyl around each of the holes. Once the barb fitting was in place, the stainless-steel bolts were fixed with a lock-washer and nut and cinched down. The soft air line was run to the horn, and after starting the bus and building pressure in the tank, I gave a very brief voicing of the chimes and the horns, so as not to annoy the neighbors.
Here’s the horn in place, all secured and hooked up inside.
Everything worked nicely, though I found a small leak in the hardline for the chime, so I popped off the soft line, moved the line so that I could remove the pipe from the leaking fitting, replace the Teflon tape on the threads and put it all back together. As of right now, it is working well and holding pressure as it should.
Both the chimes and the horns in place and ready to go.
Now, to run this from the tank below the floor up through the bus body and out to the horns needed some other bits to work correctly. First was to put in a pressure regulator, which by adjusting the dial could throttle the pressure to any desired between zero and 200 psi, or however much was in the system.
Pressure Regulator
This was an important consideration that many of the ‘air horn kits’ that I found on-line lacked, as it allows you to quiet your air horns/chimes while you’re in an area with people out and about, rather than a highway with people in vehicles. While there are people who seem to delight in scaring people with a sudden blast of sound from an air horn at maximum pressure, this is horribly irresponsible and potentially dangerous.
As the regulator had not only a 1/2“ through port, but also two 1/4“ regulated out ports, I decided to use one of these to run to a pressure gauge that I could mount on the control panel. For this I used mainly a ‘soft’ line of a tough plastic with a 3/8“ interior dimension (but was marketed as a 1/2“ air line), which was not great at turning corners, kinking easily, and causing me to use hard 90 degree elbows to make corners. This was a great way to check what the pressure is in the auxiliary tank, but had the drawback in that when you dial back the regulator to quiet the horn/chime, you only see the regulated pressure, not the whole tank pressure. However, as the regulator dial is mounted behind the driver’s seat, this regulated gauge allows you to change the pressure without looking back for too long while driving. The gauge itself had threads that were just the size of a removed switch cap on the control panel, so the installation was relatively easy, despite having to route the line between all the other lights and switches on the panel.
‘Soft’ air lines, 1/2″ ID in the box and the 3/8″ ID around the outside …
The next step after this was to install control valves to actually work the horns. While some people on-line suggested using simple ball valves for natural gas/LP lines, these don’t automatically close, which poses an additional distraction while driving, as opposed to spring-loaded, normally closed valves. I got two non-stepped valves, which are amazingly heavy-duty. Stepped valves have three settings (closed, partly open, and full open), while non-stepped run from closed to full open and all the range in-between depending on how hard you pull on the handle.
Non-stepped control valves
To counter the possible torque of pulling on one of the handles energetically during a tense moment, I ended up deciding to use hard lines from the regulator to the valves, which made things a bit easier as I needed to split the air line to get to both of the valves.
The lines for the air horns was 1/2” (ID) line to supply the volume of air needed to sound the horn, which can drain the 20 gallon tank fairly quickly, and the hard line was constructed from ‘black’ pipe and brass fittings, and used Teflon tape to seal the threads.
Showing the hard lines from the pressure regulator to the valves mounted on the shelf to the port side of the captain’s chair.
These were attached to the shelf that I ended up constructing just above the captain’s chair on the port side, giving easy access to the valve handles, while also not blocking the view. I had expected to put a couple of hanging lines on the handles (like the old truckers had), but the valves ended up being so low and handy that I decided against it.
Another view of the hard lines and valves without so much backlighting.
While I went with hard lines from the pressure regulator to the valves, most all of the rest of the line was ‘soft’, a thick, durable air brake line of woven fiber and rubber that could be bent into tight angles without crimping or binding. This allowed for some flexibility of where to run the lines and to easily get the air to a horn along the curved roof. However, it did pose one problem; that of how to run the soft line through the flooring, which was a 20 gauge steel sheet.
The nice bright dot (of the bright driveway) is where the air line will come up
I got around this by using a short ‘hard’ pipe through the floor with flared barbs at each end to attach the pipe and the ‘soft’ line.
A brass barb fitting on a black iron pipe to go through the floor
A dark photo of the connection between the tank and the ‘through-the-floor’ fitting
The first air sounding unit I put in was the air chime. Nicely finished with brass, I wanted to install it with the pipes pointing up, but due to the construction of the lower ‘bell’ housing not having any drainage hole for rainwater, if I had, the air line down to the valve would fill with water and a winter freeze would have been disastrous. So, it got mounted sideways, which still isn’t bad. I ran the holes through one of the plates that I put over the school bus flashers, and piped a hard, brass air line in through the steel. The mounting for this was simple, as the chime had three threaded holes to secure it, so once the exterior of the holes had been ringed with butyl sealant, it went together easily and securely.
4 Note Air Chime, Brass (From raneystruckparts.com)
That said, a word of advice to people who might be considering doing something like this – be careful with your bolts after getting things in place. The butyl sticks to everything, including bolt threads, and can make it tough to get things aligned.
But it certainly can be worth it, as shown by the finished chime, in place:
