When turning steering wheel there is a clanging noise and the horn will sound

Tiny
JUDY RIEDER
  • MEMBER
  • 1998 NISSAN SENTRA
  • AUTOMATIC
  • 140 MILES
Every time I turn left or right I hear a clanging noise in the steering wheel and the horn will also sound. But the horn wont sound at every turn, but it will sound at least a couple times while we're out and about. But the clanging noise is at every turn.
Wednesday, June 5th, 2019 AT 5:24 AM

2 Replies

Tiny
CARADIODOC
  • MECHANIC
  • 33,754 POSTS
From your description, it sounds like the clock spring is coming apart. That's a wound-up ribbon cable in a plastic housing under the steering wheel. Those are used on vehicles with air bags in the steering wheel, to insure a solid and reliable electrical connection. On models of this era, there was a separate circuit for the horn switch. When the ribbon cable starts to fall apart, those circuits can touch and cause the horn to blow intermittently.

What is more worrisome is if the cable is deteriorating, you know the same thing is happening to all of the circuits in it. Two of those are for the "squib", or "initiator" circuit for the air bag. For demonstration purposes, we can light off an air bag with a little 9-volt transistor battery. In the car, that is done by the computer switching 12 volts onto the squib circuit. Now you have bare 12-volt horn wires that could potentially touch a bare squib wire. While we almost never hear of it, this is what could cause an air bag to fire unexpectedly. There are so many safeguards built into the system, but they can't protect from bare and shorted wires in the clock spring.

Here's links to a couple of related articles:

https://www.2carpros.com/articles/symptoms-of-a-bad-airbag-clock-spring

https://www.2carpros.com/articles/steering-wheel-clock-spring-removal
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Wednesday, June 5th, 2019 AT 5:33 PM
Tiny
DANNY L
  • MECHANIC
  • 5,648 POSTS
Hello, I'm Danny.

There is a clock spring assembly under the steering wheel inside the column that sounds defective.It's a electric ribbon that allows flexibility to have steering wheel cycle side to side and maintains electrical contact to honk horn and control airbag. Here is a tutorial showing what's involved:

https://www.2carpros.com/articles/symptoms-of-a-bad-airbag-clock-spring

https://www.2carpros.com/articles/steering-wheel-clock-spring-removal

Hope this helps and thanks for using 2CarPros.
Danny-
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Wednesday, June 5th, 2019 AT 5:35 PM

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