How to Install HELLA Horns 2010-14 Subaru Outback

Hey, friends. It's Len here at 1A Auto. Today we're going to be working on a 2013 Subaru Outback. We're going to be replacing some horns. It's going to be a fun job. I want to be the guy that shows you how to do it. If you need these or any other parts, you can always check us out at 1aauto.com.

So here's how it sounds with the original Subaru horns. And now we'll see how it sounds with the new HELLA horns that we're going to install.

First thing that we're going to want to do is we're going to try to take off this part of the grill, so we can see what's going on behind here. There should be a horn located right about here, and one right behind here, so we'll take that out of the way as well.

That's easily accomplished, just by removing these little clips right here. Okay? We're going to remove all these clips coming all the way along here, and then behind there, there's going to be a couple little screws. We'll pull those out, and then this should just want to pop right off.

Oh. Another thing to mention with these clips, is if you pull the lock all the way up, it actually kind of locks it in that way, too. So you only want it to be about halfway up. Okay?

So we'll just go ahead and remove all those, and then we'll get to where the screws are and I'll show you that.

Last one. Come on. You can get these clips all the way up. There it is. I got a whole bunch of clips. Everything moves around. That. Put all my clips in my little thing here. And you get a clip, and you get a clip, and set them out of the way. Grab this, just slides right out. Okay? This slides into your air filter housing. Pretty easy. Set that up and out of the way.

And you can start pulling things around a little bit. You want to be gentle, it's just plastic. Set that up and out of the way. Okay? I can see our first horn right here. That's nice. We're not too worried about that yet. Let's continue with removing this though.

There's a Phillips head right back here, and then there's one going to be in the same area over there. So we'll take those off, and just get my screwdriver ready.

So I'm just pulling back on this bumper area right here to give myself access. I'll remove this screw. It's only screwed into plastic, so removing it should be fairly easy. And installing it, you want to make sure you don't go too tight, because it will strip out. I'll just put that aside with my bucket of goodies.

I'm going to move over to the other side. Do the same thing, my Phillips head screwdriver. Here we are. Now we're cruising, aren't we? So here we go.

Now we have to assess our situation. Down here there's a clip right there. Just push that down, it should separate. There's a Phillips head, a Phillips head, and there's another clip right there. So I grabbed a stubby screwdriver, give myself a little bit of space. Almost. There we are. Looks like it's about the same as the other two. I don't have to worry about mixing those up. That's nice.

Put that there. Just going to push down on this other clip. There we are.

All right, friends. So we've got our two brand new quality 1A Auto HELLA horns here. We have our original quality Subaru horn here, and the other one's located somewhere back there, which I'll show you how to get to in a second.

But what I wanted to talk about is, where should we mount these things? Right? Me personally, I like things to be pretty symmetrical in life, right? I don't want to have one here and one there or something like that. If I'm going to put one someplace like this one, they put one here, I would probably go maybe right there. But as you can tell, there's no hole there. I'd have to either cut this, make my own hole, drill it in, go that way, or, I noticed that there's a bolt right here, and there's another one right there. And they just happen to be the perfect size to be able to put these in. Okay? So that's where I'm going to go, is I'm just going to go right there.

I'm going to get this one out of the way so it won't be blocking me or anything like that, and that's where we're going to go from there. Okay?

So we know approximately where we're going to put them. Something to think about is this one, if I mount it here, I got wiring leads right to there. It's perfect, right? This is my positive lead, my ground's going to be right through this bolt, so that's easy enough. I'm going to do that with a little wire, I'll show you that.

But what about the other one? The wiring leads to back there, and it's not going to reach all the way over here. So you're going to have to have an extra little piece of wire and a couple connectors, or some solder, whatever you're into. So just keep that in mind when you go to mount it this way.

You could also just mount it the same way that Subaru has them. Put one with this one, and then find the other one, which is right here, located down underneath this. You can go ahead and swap that one out. Just unbolt it and put your other HELLA horn under there. It's completely up to you what you want to do. You do you, boo boo.

As for now, let's just get these mounted up and we'll keep on rolling.

We're just going to disconnect this right here. It just has a little push button. It slides right out. All right? I'll show you. Click it in, squeeze it, pull it out. Okay? One wire. Can't mess it up. Easy peasy. We'll get that out of the way.

We're going to use our 12 mm socket. Turn it to the left, counter-clockwise. Unscrew this bolt. There we are.

So a quick product comparison, is you can tell they're both the exact same. Maybe not. This is the original product right here from Subaru. It's got a single wire. It grounds through right here. Okay? And it just mounts right here. This is our quality 1A Auto part. It's a HELLA version, so that's cool. It's got a positive and a negative, so when you ground it, you're going to have to use this, which isn't a big deal. It's actually a little bit better probably, right? And as you can tell, you put something like this behind your grill, wherever it is you decide to put it, it's going to look way cooler than this right here. This one goes beep beep. This one goes boop boop. All right?

So let's go ahead with the install.

Okay, so where I would like to put it, because it's going to be symmetrical, I'd like to mount one horn right here and the other horn right on this bolt right here. So what we're going to need to do is we're going to need to find a ground. Okay?

To get to this bolt right here, what we're going to actually have to do is remove this, and that'll give us some wiggle room here. So when we remove this bolt, we can just go ahead and create a jump wire that's going to go from the back side of our horn, and it's going to ground out right to the body of our vehicle. It's going to be perfect. All we need is a couple little pieces of wire and some connectors, and off we go. So let's go ahead and make those real quick.

Here's some of the parts that we're going to be using for this. Going to be fairly simple. We've got some wiring, we've got a connector, which we're going to put our bolt through and go into the body, and then we've got the connector for the back side of the horn. We'll just cut a couple small pieces the size we need, and we'll go ahead and build it up.

All right, so here we go. I've got the stuff we're going to need to build our ground wire. We've got wiring obviously, a little bit of heat shrink, super important. I've got a terminal end. This is going to go ground to the body, and then I've got terminal ends here also. These are going to go to the ground end of the horn. So we're just going to figure out how long of a wire we need. We'll snip it, we'll get it all cleaned up, we'll get it mounted up, and off we go.

We're going to figure out how much wire we need here. We're going to figure out where we're going to put our horn, which we decided we're going to go on here. Let's just kind of say that it's on there. Here's where our ground's going to go to, it's what we mentioned. So I'll take some wire, go like this, and then I'll just run it right down along to approximately where it's going to go. That's about how much wire we need, so now we'll go ahead and snip it. We'll get it cleaned up like this end, we'll put on both of our terminal ends, we'll move along.

So this is about the length that we said we needed. Perfect. If you wanted to, you can go match it back up to the vehicle and make sure that you didn't mix it up. I didn't move my finger one inch, so I'm just going to go ahead trim a second piece. Same size, two wires. We'll set this piece aside. I'm going to see if I can reuse it for the rest of the wiring I'm going to have to do.

So I've got one side already pre-done, which basically all I did was take off the outer sheathing. I'm going to do the same thing on this side. I like to give them a little twist. Some people say you don't have to, it's up to you. There you go. Very nice. So there we are.

We've got the ground to body connector. I'm just going to go ahead and put this right inside there. Okay? Just get down in as far as I can get it. I'm going to take my little crimper end, and I'm just going to crimp it down. What I want to do... Can you see the wire sticking through right there? Yeah? I want to make sure that I'm crimping this metal part down onto that wire, and I'm not crimping down onto the outer sheathing there, because that won't help us any. Just give it a little squeeze. Okay. You always give it a little tug. It feels pretty good, it's going nowhere. Perfect.

If you had some heat shrink, now would be the time to slip it over before you go ahead and put on the other terminal end. I've heard of people that accidentally sometimes forget to put on the heat shrink until it's too late. And that's fine. It is what it is. Just want to see if you can get it over it. We know the wire came through the other side as well. Some heat shrink come with like a sticky goo inside, and that's great because then once you heat it up it all just melts and creates some kind of wiring goodness that doesn't let moisture in. This particular type right here doesn't necessarily have that, so I'm just going to go with it is what it is and go with what I've got.

Next I'm going to put on another piece of heat shrink, and then I'm going to put on my other connector.

This is the connector female end that's going to go onto the male connector on the horn itself. Okay? I've got my other heat shrink on. Double check. I don't want to be that guy. Not today. You give it a squeeze, give her a nice tug. Beautiful. We'll just bring our heat shrink up, get it up as high as we can. Now we're just going to heat this puppy up and it should melt down or shrink down, and should coat this wire to help keep moisture and everything else out.

I've got my little butane lighter here. I don't want to set anything on fire, set off the smoke alarm. I'm going to hold it at a reasonable distance, just to the point that it can melt down. Obviously if I'm using a torch it's going to get hot, so you have to keep that in mind. You can see it melting down nice. It doesn't take long. Let's get that melted. Like I said, it's going to be hot, but you just go quick. Easy peasy.

You won't get much moisture in between there, so that's going to be great. Moisture gets into an electrical connection, you're going to have issues.

Do the same to the other side. Sometimes it sounds like it's making a flame. Just go a little bit more down here. If you see any smoke, try not to inhale it obviously. So now we've created one ground wire. We're going to go ahead and do the same to the other piece of wire, and we'll move on to our next step.

So here we go. We've got our two ground wires. We'll set one aside for later. I'm going to start with my favorite one, this one. I don't really have a favorite. Although my mom does say I'm her favorite son. I'm her only son, but... You know, I don't like to try to let that hold me back.

I might have to get a wrench in here. Let's see if we can do it. It seems like while this is coming loose, it's going to move around quite a bit, so I'm just going to make sure that I hold that bracket and have it ready. Almost there.

There's our bolt. We've got our horn. We could try to put it through with this original bolt if we want. We could also see if we can find something a little longer. This one seems like it might be okay, so let's just try going with this one first.

Let me try to get it lined up, try being the operative word there. Trying to get my fingers in here... to get it lined up. That's going to be... Super fun part.

I'm going to try using a Phillips head because this bolt has a little Phillips head angle on there, or head, and it lets me get in there. Now that I've got it started, now I'm going to get the rest of the bracket lined up, and then we'll just go ahead and tighten it up.

So this should want to lift up. There's a little ear right there. That's got to poke through the hole, okay? That looks like it's pretty good at this point, so now we can go ahead and continue tightening this up. Get it as tight as you want it. Pretty tight would be good, because if you don't tighten it, your horn's going to be able to move around. So you can continue with your screwdriver, you could try to use a wrench, you could even try to use your socket over there. Whatever you might have access to, but basically just get it as tight as you can. Obviously without stripping it out. I should add that, because you are just screwing into aluminum, so I'll bare that in mind.

Feels pretty good. Get my wrench out of there, try to give it a little wiggle up and down. That feels pretty great.

Okay, this screw right here, we're going to have it for our ground wire. Right? That's what we mentioned earlier. So we want to go ahead and hook up our ground wire to the back side there.

I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to run the ground from the one that's furthest out. If you're using something like this, you might have to just give it a little bend, because otherwise it might come pretty close to your condenser. Just bend it. Once you bend it, don't bend it back and then bend it again and bend it back. Once I get it on, I'll go ahead and show you here. Just takes a little bit of fumbling because of these gloves.

There we are. I'm going to run this up and over. I'm going to bring it right up to my spot that I had designated.

So where this connector's going to mount onto with the bolt, we just want to try to rub off a little of that paint. We don't want it go all over the place and create a big ugly area that's going to accumulate rust. Take a little piece of sandpaper, put it on your thumb, just give it a little scratching. Just give it a go here, and then I'll show you.

Here we go. It's getting there. I could work at it some more. Spend as much time as you feel like you need. It does need to make a ground though, so keep that in mind. Basically you want to make sure that the metal part from your connector is touching metal on the vehicle. You just want to make sure that you have a ground like I said. So we'll say that that's decent.

We'll go ahead and put in this 10mm head bolt right here. I'm going to continue with my ratchet. Feels decent. Wire's nice and tucked away. It's not super long and hanging all over the place. We did a pretty good job on that.

We have our original horn wire right here. Make sure there's no funny colors in there or anything like that. Looks pretty decent, maybe a little dirty.

Let me try to find the connector under here. It's right on the back side of the horn. We'll just clip it in, and there it is.

So this wire right here, we're going to go ahead and see if we can run a little jumper wire going from down where this horn connected in down in there. I'm going to try to just come up, and you can run it however you want, but you definitely want to make sure that it's secured. So I would go up and along here, and then you can use a little piece of wire tie. Bring it along this. You can even bring it underneath if you want, make it look a little better.

And then we're going to be mounting our horn over here. Right? That's where we decided we were going to mount them, right in this. So what we're going to do, we got plenty of space here, let's just go ahead and we'll put on the male connector on that side so we can connect it in. We'll figure out the exact routing that we want to run the wire. I'll probably try to go underneath. And then we'll be able to figure out, once we get this horn mounted in, how much extra we have. We'll trim it and finish it off.

So what we're going to do is we're going to take our little wire strippers here. We're going to use the right gauge stripping area. All we're going to try to do is just take off the outer sheathing of it. Just a little plastic. Same thing like what we did before. I like to give the inner wires a little twist. It keeps them from fraying. And then I'm just going to find the right male connector for the size wire that I'm using. This one looks like it's nice and small. This one's got a bigger hole inside. I don't think I need anything that big for this size wire.

So I use the right tool for the right job, and the right part for the right job, right? I'm just going to put it in the hole there. I got it coming through. Can you see it? Peek-a-boo! Now I'm just going to crimp it. Give it a little squeeze. That feels pretty good.

Next we'll grab a little bit of heat shrink. You can use that if you want. You don't have to, it's your prerogative. I'm just going to put it over, I'm going to shrink it up, keep the moisture out of there, and we'll continue. Just slide it over... maybe. There we go, it's going. Okay. I'm going to bring it back so it's covering part of the metal and it's coming down over the wire. Now I'm going to go ahead and shrink it. Just use a little mini torch, being very careful. It's going to get hot, so we want to make sure we're safe. Just heat all around it. You can see it shrinking right down. That's going to keep all the moisture out of there. This thing's going to be good forever and ever... theoretically.

There we are. So now we have our male connection on there. This is going to go into the wiring where the horn wire came into the horn. This is basically going to take place of the horn. Right? I'm going to connect this into the wiring. I'm going to run it up along the body of the car, bring it over to where the new horn's going to be.

So we've got our female connector down there, I'm holding it in my hand. Give it a little wiggle, you can see it. I've got my male connector. I'm going to go ahead and see if I can get my hands down in here. You're probably not going to be able to see this part, sorry. I'll show you in one second.

All I did there was just slip them together, so they're connected. Now I've got my wiring going across, and we're clear to set this up to go to the other horn.

I'd like to note that you can go ahead and take off this horn if you want. It's just one bolt right there, and that'll just pop right out. I'm not really too worried about it for right now. You can remove it if you want. Your prerogative. You do you, boo boo. Let's move along.

We're going to figure out where we want to put this wire. You can either run it up top along here, in between there. Basically wherever you put it, you're going to want to make sure that it's safely secured and not just dangling down like this. Things that are dangling are sure to get caught on something, ripped. Give them a tug, they get broken, your horn's not going to work.

So the way I took the wires just right up along here. It's not going to get caught on anything. I could wire tie it in, keep it nice and secure. But I brought it up high, and then I'm bringing it down under here. I'm going to go ahead and take one of my wire ties, and I'm just going to try to secure the wire so it can't move around. Get right behind there, make some funny noises. Give it a little snip, looks better that way.

Bringing it behind here. I'm just going to go all the way over. Under here is your hood release cable. Okay, pull it down a little bit so you can see it. I'm just going to take another wire tie and I'm going to just wire tie this wire right to that, because that's going nowhere. There we are.

So now we can kind of still move it around if we need to. We still got plenty of wiggle room, but it's not falling down, hanging down. It's not going to get caught on anything. Look at all this wire we've got.

So now what we're going to do, we're going to go ahead and remove this and remove this, and we're going to get our next horn set up in here, and then we'll figure out how much wiring we need for that. This is also where we're going to mount our ground, so we'll go ahead and remove that. There we are. Set it aside so we can't lose it. Now we got some wiggle room. Love it. See if we can get this in there. If you can't, you could use a wrench. It's just a 10 mm, it's nothing special. You could also use a Phillips head. That worked great for putting in the other one, so that's probably what I'll use again on this one.

There it is. There's our bolt. Like I said, you can use a Phillips head if you need to. Set that aside. Got our little bracket back here. We want to make sure that we don't lose that. Okay. Let's see if we can find... Okay. There's a little arm right here. This goes through that hole. That just keeps that from moving. Okay?

We'll grab our horn. Take a look at it. I marked which one's the ground wire, so the one with the yellow there, that's the ground. This one would be the positive side. So just keep that in mind when you're mounting yours, the side opposite to the arm is the ground.

Go ahead and try to get it situated. Getting this in is going to be rather hard, so I'm going to grab my Phillips head screwdriver. That'll make it much easier for me.

So right here, this is where we're going to be mounting our ground wire to. So we just want to make sure that we can scuffle a little bit of this paint off of here. We don't want to go too much all down here or anything like that, because anywhere you scuff off paint it's going to rust. But we do want to make sure we have a great connection for the ground. I'm just going to take a little piece of sandpaper. Take a look at it. It's looking pretty good, maybe a little bit more. Getting there.

You need to have a good ground so you can have power transference. I'd say that looks pretty good. You could try using a Wizzer Wheel or something if you wanted to. If you're very accurate, that's great for you. Sandpaper works just as well.

All right. So now we know where we're going to be putting our ground wire. We're going to go ahead and grab our horn again.

All right, so I'm just going to start this little bolt in up here. Not too much, just enough to keep it so that bracket doesn't move around too much on me. And that way there it's not going to keep falling out when I try to mount this, because you know how things are. They're just going to give you a hassle.

So I've got my quality 1A Auto HELLA horn here. I've got my Phillips head bolt there, and my Phillips head screwdriver. Now I'm just going to try to get everything lined up.

Feels like it's screwing in pretty good. That's nice. I'm going to try to line up the horn so it's not just laying down like this. I like things to be pretty straight.

I'm going to try to get this down as tight as I can get it, and then I'm going to grab a 10 mm, probably a wrench, and I'm going to try to tighten that up as much as possible. I'll just grab my wrench, got my 10. I'm just going to tighten it up.

I'm going to be screwing into aluminum here, so you don't need to really put your whole body weight into it. All you want to do is just make sure that it's tight enough so this horn can't wobble around. You're going to be hitting bumps with your vehicle. If you live in New England like me, the roads are... quality. And I appreciate all of everybody's efforts on taking care of them, but yeah. They're bumpy. So realistically.

So I took this bolt back out now. We can move this back around if we want to. Now we're clear to start getting ready to do some wiring. As you can tell, we got a whole bunch of extra wiring.

Before we go ahead and cut anything off, we're just going to double check to make sure everything's lined up over here where we want it. We might have to put in one more wire tie. We'll check it. Just check the way it runs. Make sure it's not going to get caught on anything. If it does, you can just run it and... So that feels like it's pretty good just like that. I'm just going to go right to this wiring harness right here, and that'll hold it from moving around too much. So I can grab a wire tie.

I've got my wire, got my little wiring harness here. I'm just going to go right to it with my wire tie. Get my hand out of the way. It's pretty basic at this point, right? All I'm doing is securing it so it can't move around and get caught on anything. There we are. Trim off the extra. Hide that wire away. Looks nice and pretty.

Now we got a whole bunch of extra wiring here, right? So what we'll do, we'll give ourselves a little extra, not too much. We trim it. There we are. Go like that, just take off the outer sheathing. Give it a little twist. There we go.

I got my female connector. I can go ahead and put this right on here. First I'm going to grab a little bit of heat shrink. I'm just going to slide it over the wire first. This seems like it's going to make life so much easier than try to squeeze it over that other thing. There we go. Slide my wire in so I can see it poking out the other end, and I'm going to crimp it down, all right? I got a little red dot there, that's the one I'm going to go with. It's just a small connector. If it was a bigger one like the yellow, I'd use the yellow dot. They got it pretty well labeled for us. Give it a nice crimp, give it a nice tug. Feels great.

Slide my heat shrink over it. There we are. It's going to get hot once again, so be careful. We don't want to aim it right next to our bumper or anything like that, or even our brand new horn. What we're going to do now is just melt it down. It's what we've been doing. I don't have to get into an explanation about it anymore. At this point I'm sure you guys are professionals.

That looks pretty great. We're not going to get any moisture in there. Perfect.

So now we're going to have to get these back here, okay? Remember that the negative was opposite to where the bar was, so the bar's here. So this side over here is the negative. The positive is going to be this side. All right? We're pretty close to our condenser back there, our air conditioning condenser, so all I'm going to do is I'm just going to try to bend it just enough. I don't need to go too much, I don't want to try to break it off. I just worked hard on it. It took me two seconds.

I'm going to connect it on to the ear hopefully here. There we are. Hide that wire away. We're cruising.

So now we've got our next wire. This is our ground wire that we made earlier. Great job. Looks pretty good. We're going to take it, I'm just going to bend it just like I did the other one, just a little bit. There we are. And then I'm going to run it the exact way that I ran the other one. This one I just kind of ran up and over the top, so well, why not? Do the same thing with this one.

It's going to go right there. I've got my 10 mm head bolt and my little ratchet. I'm just going to put it here, right through there, put my ratchet on tighten. I'm going to turn it to the right now, right? Tighten. There we are. Nice and snug.

See if they look symmetrical. It's important. I think they look amazing.

All right. Now we're clear to give them a try. All right, let's give them a try. Get out of the way!

Now it's time to reinstall our grill. We're going to bring it over to the vehicle. As you can tell, I painted it up nice while I had it off because well, that's what I wanted to do. There's a couple of little push clips down along the bottom. We remember those. There's one over here, and there's one down over there. We've just going to get those lined up. Now, there's going to be two screws down along the bottom. They're just our little Phillips heads. There's nothing special about them, but one thing that we do have to note is we're going to need a small screwdriver to get in there. We used it to get it out, we're going to use it to get it in.

I'm just going to get my arm down in there. Start it in. There's two holes. There's one right here, and then there's going to be one right there. Just get it in, start it in by hand. All we're going to be doing is screwing into plastic, so you really don't need to reef onto them very much. You do want them to be snugged up so they can't come out, but you don't need to really grip into it. It's just plastic, everybody.

Try and get that in. That feels good. Okay, set that aside. Very nice, that looks good.

So here we have one hole. There's going to be another one on the other side of the grill. It's the exact same spot. This is what our screw looked like. All it is is a Phillips head, same as the other two that we put in the bottom.

This time I'm going to go ahead and use a long-handled screwdriver. I'm just going to try to get it in the hole. Lets see if I can get it. Yeah. This is just going to screw the plastic grill to the plastic part of the bumper. And like I said, it's all just plastic. Once it feels like it's bottomed out, just stop there. You know? I mean, I wouldn't say really give it an extra tweak only because it's just plastic.

All right. We got that done. Here comes the fun part. I feel like I've done this so many times. I'm going to take this. I'm just going to try to slide it behind here, getting this arm in and through the hole... Just like that. The grill sits on top of this. So just lift it up. There we are. That works pretty great.

We've got our air filter housing. This is the inlet that goes into the box, this is the front where the air gets forced into. I'm going to go ahead and put it into the air filter box first, because it slides in, not over. I'm going to line up all the holes, and now we'll grab some push clips. See if I can find them here.

Okay. So we've got a whole bunch of push clips. It's easy to worry about which one's which. We might feel a little worried. There's two that look like this, and all the others look the exact same. So you don't have to worry about what goes where. All we have to worry about is these two right here. They go right here, okay? Very simple. Just put them in, give them a little push. Those are nice and locked in, and now we're just going to walk the line and we're going to fill all the holes. If it seems like it doesn't want to go in, you might have the push clip up a little bit too high, which also puts it in like a semi-locked position. So just wiggle it, see if you can push it down. There it is. There we are.

Those all look pretty great. Perfect. Let's make sure we clean up our mess, and that's it.

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