^Good job and congrats on the mod. Recheck torques after about 300 miles. Oh...you left the mirrors out...

 

Well done.

Just be careful you don't give someone a heart attack when using those horns. UnregisteredUser would fall right over.

 

thanks man.

 

Nah... We could have Horn Wars. I'm fixin' to add 3dB to my add-on. I can already push deer and elk off of the highway with ease, but I want to push trains off their tracks.

 

Do you use your horn in place of the brake pedal?

 

Braking might keep the lead animal out of your grille, but it leaves the second one to broadside your truck. Not that you didn't know this already.

For those who don't know: Hooves get almost no traction on asphalt. It's not at all uncommon for the second, third, etc. critter who's in a panic and just instinctively following the lead animal, upon realizing that it can't stop in time to avoid the wreck, to rear and try to push off of the side of the vehicle, or to try to leap over it. Your day takes a dramatic turn for the worse if you're sitting there when those hooves come through the glass next to your head. Nasty loud horns applied at the right time, neither so far out that they evoke curiosity rather than fear nor so close in that the animals don't have time to react, will most often push the critters away from the roadway. Factory horns aren't nearly loud enough at any useful distance and will more often than not just arouse the critter's curiosity to keep it frozen in place until it's too late. It's like whistling loudly at fleeing deer when hunting -- most of the time the animal(s) will stop and turn to see what made the unusual noise, giving you a second chance to get off a shot. Except that the second chance is for the critter to paint your grille.

Cattle are even worse, harder to motivate, and some bulls will charge at weak factory horns. Got lots of beeves around here that I'd rather see on my plate than in my grille.

 

I was driving my old chevy truck up a twisty road at some speed one day...... (yeah, it wasn't my firebird, but, I drove it like it was anyway when I forgot that little detail...) Came around an uphill corner, only to see a HORSE walking casually in my lane, with a car coming from the other direction.... nowhere to go, so, STOOD on the brake pedal, and slowed enough (with some rather interesting sound effects) to NOT hit the horse, though it was DAMN close....... The horse just sorta looked around at me, and didn't break stride from his slow walk...... I haven't the faintest idea where he thought he was going.... but, he sure didn't seem to care about the truck that just about tried to crawl up his hiney.

THAT was a pants-filling moment.....

 

TMI, man. But a good reminder about driving near livestock. Horses and cattle just DGAF.

About 20 years ago a neighbor's 16 year old daughter was on her way home from some evening extracurricular activity and met up with an Angus. She was driving a low slung passenger car so the windshield met the bulk of the cow, killing both kid and cow. The cops estimated the impact speed at 50MPH (in a 55MPH zone) and said that the evidence indicated that she probably didn't see the animal until she was just about on top of it.

We get a lot of animal strikes in this part of the world, which is why I have as one of my greatest pet peeves drivers running fog lamps while traveling at highway speeds.

 

What's wrong with fog lamps?

 

Nothing's wrong with them when used for their intended purpose, which is increasing illumination of the roadway immediately ahead of and to the sides of the vehicle during low visibility conditions when distance vision doesn't matter because it simply cannot be had by any means.

The limitation is the working of the human eye. In low light conditions the iris opens up (pupils dilate) to allow more light into the eye, and in brighter conditions the iris closes (pupils constrict) to reduce the amount of light getting in. There's no one size fits all solution, which is why it's difficult to see beyond a campfire -- your pupils constrict to limit the light input due to the brightness of the fire, and anything that's not very near the fire (or another light source) is shadowy or invisible to you. Fog lights, by design, are like that campfire.

So it's a clear night and you're running at highway speeds, 55-75MPH, with your fog lights on. You've got a bright pool of light just ahead of and to the sides of the vehicle, and your eyes react to how much light is being reflected back into them by closing the iris. They're adjusting for optimal vision in the brightest part of your view of the world, just ahead of and to the sides of the vehicle -- which means being not adjusted for the dimmer view out at the leading edge of your headlight pattern. You're looking past a campfire, basically, and you cannot have the same visual acuity at the distances you'd otherwise have were the fog lamps off.

Ain't no big thing if everything you need to see is self illuminated (like other vehicles, traffic signals, the 7-11) or highly reflective (like the signs, the retroreflective paint on the pavement, etc.) because the light coming from those sources is bright enough to compete with the fog lamps. But if you need to see not so reflective things like an Angus bull standing on the pavement, those fog lamps make sure you cannot see him until you're closer to him -- until he's in the brightly illuminated area to which your eyes have adjusted. What's happening there is that you're overdriving your headlights but can't perceive it as such because your perception is of a goodly quantity of light reaching your optic nerves. That's what makes it so dangerous: The perception of light makes you feel safer even though you're at greater risk.

It's a simple enough thing once you think about it: You want to detect dark obstacles on the road as early as possible so you have time to decide and react to prevent a horrible thing from happening. In low visibility, at appropriate speeds, fog lamps can save your life by giving you that. At highway speeds, fog lamps can cost you your life by denying you that. That's why the factory only gives you the choice of having either high beams or fogs but not both at the same time.

A related thing that most folks never think about is their instrument panel illumination. Those people you see on the two lane brightly illuminated by their dashboard lights are night blind and don't even know it. They feel safe. They'll even argue that they're safer because they can see the gauges better -- as if the tachometer is more important information than the presence of a large animal or a boulder on the roadway.

So that's my rant.