I’m spending a little time today getting catching a couple of things up on the trike in preparation for the summer.
I typically carry an air horn on the trike to ward off overly ambitious canines and, on occasion, to make drivers aware of my existence. Last year I had set up the horn so that it mounted via Velcro to my left fender strut. This worked… ok, but the position was somewhat awkward to get to, and the air cans that I had just barely fit into the space.
Awkward, yes, but to be honest I would have put the new ones in the same space except that an errant click on Amazon resulted in my ordering a size larger of horn than I did last year.
I’m really not sure how it happened, but it happened nonetheless, and so I found myself needing to find a different - possibly better? - solution for the horn placement.
On the boom of the trike I have the both very useful and delightfully named Adjustomatic Bottle Mount by Terracycle. I have it set up with two drink holders, but I almost always just carry one water bottle, so that seemed to be a good candidate for a place for the air horn. It is also central to the trike, so it seemed likely to be a better option for sounding it off when needed.
If I had been very lucky, the larger size air cans I bought would have just fit snuggly into the bottle holder, but we know without even checking that the fates would not have things work out that easily. Too big for the fender, but not quite big enough to sit securely in the bottle holder.
So I went looking for something that would fit in the holder and be able to contain the air horn. I had originally considered raiding the beer cozy drawer to see if one of those could be repurposed (don’t tell MLW), but then I realized that a drink can itself was just about exactly the right size, and we have an abundance of those (out where we are they don’t take recycling, but the salvage yard in town takes aluminum, so we lean towards aluminum cans). I pulled a likely candidate out of the pre-crushing pile.
I went with a fizzy-water can, mostly because I knew the former contents wouldn’t have left it sticky or stinky. The fact that the can itself happens to be orange had absolutely nothing to do with my selection process. I swear!
I liked up the air horn and the can to make sure it looked like it would all go together okay…
Can and air Horn
Can and air horn
…and then I set about opening up the top of the can so the horn would be able to slide in.
Can opener
I used a utility knife for this and worked gingerly in order to avoid tearing the aluminum (the LaCroix cans seem to be thinner than other aluminum cans for some reason). Then I put several short notches in the top of the now open can and folded it over and covered that with duct take to cover the sharp edges:
Can do
The air horn fit inside, but it fit loosely, which meant that it would rattle and bounce around in the can. I’d expected that this would be an issue, and my first attempt to address it was to cut up several strips of styrofoam that I had laying around from packaging. This had multiple effects, mostly related to bits of styrofoam going everywhere and not at all related to working the way that I’d hoped. So I looked around for a plan B, and realized that I had some clean shop rags available. I cut one in half and wrapped the can part of the air horn up in the rag, attaching and closing it with another helpful application of the duct tape (thanks again, Red Green…).
Wrap it up
This appeared to do the trick, making the air horn fit snugly into the can. I tucked some of the shop rag into the can around the top to secure it better, and then fit the whole thing into the bottle holder.
In place, but not quite right yet
The whole thing fit ok, but was a little loose in the bottle holder, so I marked off where the holder wraps around the can with a sharpie, and wrapped a layer of duct tape around that part of the can so it would fit more tightly:
That’s better
And there you have it - centrally located air horn mounted for an approximate cost of nothing (or - to be fair, maybe 12 cents worth of duct tape and a shop rag) and maybe half an hour of actual work outside of sorting things out. We’ll see over the next ride how it handles with respect to being secure and quiet in the holder. If I’m lucky I won’t have to use it, but I’ll report back as to how it works if I do (and, for better or worse, I always have to use it eventually).
Now - time to ride…
Smack dab in the middle