I bought the horns from someone that I used to work with back in 1998. He had them sitting in the trunk of his Volvo for the an unknown amount of time. When I bought my Aerostar Mini-Van, I decided to customize the van. I was at a function being hosted by my job and was talking about adding a set of these air horns to my van. He approached me and said "Have I got something for you!!!" It was then I was brought to his car where he opened the trunk of his car and there they were. I made him an offer right there on the spot and he turned it down... I immediately added $100 more to the offer and again he declined my offer. That night, he called me and decided to take the offer I made and sell the horns to me. I had these horns sitting in my shop for about 6 months and finally decided to take on the job of stripping the paint off of them, open up the horns and clean out the dirt inside the throats of the horns. I put the horns back together and tuned them up to get them working in almost full capacity. About a year later I rolled up to the sister store that I used to work for and let these horns rip. No sooner than I did that, The person that sold me the horns came rushing out of the building to see what was that he had herd. He came up to my van and said to me "I never thought you would get those horns working man! I have had them for a long time and tried to get them to work without any success!" I have tried a few different valves on them and found out by trial and error that a large diameter 1/4 turn gas valve works the best on a large diameter air hose supply.

The current setup I have on the horns is a Graham White 353-100 Pull Handle Air Valve with 5/8th inch fittings.
The airlines used is 200 psi. rated 1 inch, 5/8 inch I.D. hose. A12 gallon air tank on the console of my van pressurized to 125 psi. For the 22 inch Grover Stuttertone truck horns, I have a completely different valve system but also running on the same air tank.

In this video, only the K5LA horns was used. I did not sound the truck horns. That will be for a later demonstration.

A little history about the K5LA....

The K5H/K5L was introduced in 1954 and was tuned to comply with Canadian regulations for a D# minor chord. It wasn't until 1975, more than twenty years after the initial introduction of the K-series, that a major-key tuning variation was introduced. At the request of Amtrak, the K5LA was developed with the #3 and #4 bells lowered from A# to G# and C to B respectively. The bells were mounted on a new low-profile manifold, resulting in the K5LA designation. This horn has proved to be extremely popular, to the point where after the year 2000 it was the most widespread locomotive horn in North America.

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