How to Remove Horns 2010-17 Chevy Equinox

Hey, friends. It's Len here at 1A Auto. Today, I'm working on a 2015 Chevy Equinox. We're going to be removing the horn assemblies. It's going to be a very simple job. I want to be the guy that shows you how to do it. If you need any parts, you can always check us out 1AAuto.com. Thanks.

Okay, so what we're going to do is we're going to try and get this little plastic plate off of here. There are some push clips. I'm going to go ahead and remove these. The center of these pulls up from the outer part of it. I'll show you what it looks like here. That's what they look like. When you have the center pushed in, it forces those two sides out, which holds it in the hole, okay? That's why you lift up the center part, it relieves pressure and this thing can squish and slides right out of the hole. Okay? We're going to do the same thing for all of these. Just a little spot you can try and get your tool into. I'm using my little forkey tool. You can use whatever you've got. A pocket screwdriver usually works pretty well. We'll set these aside. Sometimes they come apart. That's okay. We'll just shove it back together. Easy peasy.

Okay, so we've got those four out. Let's see if I can grab this plastic. Wiggle it around, see what's holding it in. Now that we've got this side off, we're going to do the same to the other side of the vehicle and then we'll go ahead and we'll start removing the rest of the bumper cover. There we go. Get that went out of the way.

Now we're going to remove these. These are Torx bits, little T20s, like little stars. This is what the tool looks like. Put it in here. Turn it to the left. Zip them all out. I'm going to leave one, I'm just going to have it loose, though. That's just going to make it so the bumper cover stays on while we continue down to the bottom there and it'll hold it up for us. That's what those look like. They're all the same. You've got the one that's still there, of course. This can move around a little bit. Perfect. Let's move along.

We're going to do some push clips here. We've got to push clip right there, okay? There's going to be another one right in front of this tire right there, here, and here. After we removed those, there's a T20 and a T20 there. The same tool that we used up top we're going to use down bottom. Okay? I got my little forkey tool. I got a little pocket screwdriver. I'm just going to see about trying to pull out the centers of these push clips. I showed you how they worked already. I'll show you again just in case When it was closed, it was like that. Just go in between, pull out the center, and then it unlocks the little edges there.

Here we go. We got that one. Then we'll move down the line. Grab this guy. All right. This one's going to be a little harder to get to because of the tire, but I'm sure can be done. Okay. We got our push clips. We'll set it aside. Got our T20. Here, here. They both look the same, easy peasy. Can't mix them up. That feels pretty great.

Take a peek under here. We've got that bolt right there. I'm going to grab the size for that real quick. I'll let you know what it is. Once we get that out, we're going to do the same exact thing for the other side of the vehicle and then we'll lift it up more and we'll grab everything from underneath.

All right, so we've got our 7mm. I'm going to blast this out of here. There it is. Set that aside. Okay. You can you give that a little tug. Perfect. Now like I said, we're going to go do the same exact thing on the other side of the vehicle. We'll raise it up, we'll continue on releasing the rest of this bumper cover, disconnect the fog lights, of course. Then we should be clear to bring it back down and pop it all right off.

Under here, we've got our fog light assemblies. You can see them from the back side. We've got some wiring that goes to the bulb. We're just going to turn the ball to the left, counter clockwise, until it stops, and then we're going to carefully pull it out. Let's see. We'll give it a quick inspection. We've got our rubber seal there. Slide it back over. Easy enough. Should be easy enough without the flashlight in my hands is there. There it is. Cool.

All right, so something to note, you want to be very careful not to touch on that glass, especially if you've got oily hands or anything like that. Even gloves isn't really the best to touch the glass, so if you can avoid it, that's always great. Take a look, see if it looks like it's black in any way, or discolored, or swollen, or the film inside looks like it's got any like crusty buildups on it. If that was the case, you'd want to replace it and right on the back of the bulb you can see what the ball number is. It's an H11 on this particular vehicle, so I'm sure it is when yours as well you're working on the same thing. I'm just going to leave this down to dangle. Funny word, but anyway.

I'm going to leave it so it can hang like that, and I'm going to do the same to the other side. Then we'll just go ahead and we'll remove a couple more bolts here, get the lower part of this thing moving, and then we'll go head back up top. We'll take off the last bolt and we should be able to slide this right off.

Here we go. This part right here is part of the inner wheel well that we just were taken apart up there. We want to remove these two bolts. We're going to continue with our 7mm. Turn these to the left, obviously. Move right along. This little electric tool is amazing. Slides out, clear come off. Got a little triangle here, okay, so when you pull it off, you can see. That just means when you're putting it back together, that triangle is going to go back into there. Okay? It just holds it and you can put your bolts back in. Easy peasy. Okay? Cool. This is wobbling around pretty easily now. I would say we're clear to bring it back down and we'll start pulling it off.

Here we go. It's time for our last bolt up top here. We'll hold our bumper cover, make sure it doesn't want to come loose too much on us until we can figure out exactly what's going on. Don't forget we have our fog lamp bulbs just hanging under there, okay? The less that we juggle this around, probably the better overall. Let's see if I can get this off. There we are. Now we've removed our front bumper cover.

We're going to be doing the horns. It's pretty easy to get to once the bumper cover is off, right? We're just going to disconnect the electrical connector. It's a little push tab right here. Squeeze it, push it in, check for funny colors. No rust or anything in there. It looks great. Right up here there's a 10mm head. Okay? This is a bolt, it's going to pull right out, and that'll take off the whole bracket for the horn. If you're not removing the bracket and you're just removing the horn, there's a nut on the backside, but I'm just going to show you how to remove the whole bracket. It's easy enough.

Let's take our 10. Once we get it loose we can take it right off by hand pretty much here. There's our bolt. Here's our horn unit. If you're going to replace both horns, the other one's located right on the other side of the vehicle in the same exact spot and you would just repeat the process. Okay? So a 10, horn, little clip, easy peasy.

Okay, so here we go. It's time to go ahead and install our horn assembly here. As you can see, we've got the lines that show us the way that we removed it. It's going to go right along this. Got our bolt with a 10mm head. I'm just going to go ahead and put this in. Grabbed a different tool to install it. Still a 10mm, but it's going to be a little bit easier than using that wrench. Here we are. Nice and snug. Give it a little wiggle.

We've got our wiring, we already checked it, no funny colors, rust, water, debris. Nice and clipped in. If you removed the other side, you just go ahead and do the same thing to the other side and off you go.

Here we go. We've got our bumper cover. We're going to lift it up on here. We're going to be careful on these edges to make sure that they don't go hitting up against the fender, you know? I mean, this one's a little damaged, but that wasn't me by the way. Just playing. It really wasn't, though. Anyway, I'm just going to keep those edges low and I'm just going to scoop the top in up here. Just get it kind of settled in. I'm going to start a couple of these bolts just to hold it for me and then I'm going to work my way along the edges there. Get everything settled in along the top, and then I'll go down to the bottom and do the same thing. What size is this? 20. Torx bit 20. We'll keep it loose just in case we have to move some stuff around, right? Just want to make sure that it can't fall down and hit the floor. Like I said, I'm keeping all these loose. I'm just starting them in so I can move everything around as I need to, okay? Nice and loose.

Okay, let's come along here. Right up along this headlamp we had the little scoops, right? You come over here and you've got a little clip, clip, clip, clip, clip. Okay? That's where your bumper is going to want to ride in, so you're going to need to bring it up, bring it right up along your headlamp. The bumper cover itself has all these little slots in it, right? That's where those clips are going to want to ride. You're probably going to need to give it a little tug just to get it into where it needs to go. Okay. Okay. Looking good. We're going to do the same thing to the other side.

Alright, so we've got the bumper all lined up. It looks great. Couldn't have asked for better, really. I'm just going to take my Torx bit 20, snug these puppies up. Very nice. All right, now let's lift it up to our working heights so we can get to those wheel wells. We'll get all those put together. Then we'll bring it all the way up, we'll plug in our fog lights, and finish up along the bottom.

All right. We remember that we had the one 7mm head bolt. It goes right up through here, right? It goes through the bottom of the bumper cover up into the fender. I'll just use my little tool. You can use a ratchet, whatever you got. I'm just going to put it in the hole here. There it is. Nice and snug. Okay? We can grab this, slide it back into position here. Okay. Now when we look at it, you can see behind there there's a metal piece, that's where there's a screw. This one's just a big gaping hole. That's a plug, screw, hole, hole, hole. All right? Let's see what we got from parts. We've got two screws, perfect. I remember saying we needed two screws and we've got four little push clips. We didn't lose anything. We're doing all right.

There we are. Let's do the push clips first because they'll keep everything kind of generally speaking where it should be, right? Then we can worry about putting in all those screws after. There we go. So, two screws. I'm just going to grab my little Torx bit. I've got it right here. Sticking with my 20. Okay? Turn the wheel. No I'm not. Let's see if I can get this in. I'm going to grab a ratchet. I'll finish that one off in one second. Here we are. Okay, grab my ratchet. Feels great. Okay. All those are still in. Perfect. We'll do the same to the other wheel well and then we'll bring it up and continue.

Now, we're going to put it in our fog lamps. Once again, we're going to be very careful not to touch that glass. Okay? We'll just check them one more time and make sure the filament is not broken. We did a lot of moving around. I'm just going to take it, put it up in here, and just start by going all the way as far counterclockwise as I can, and then I'm going to turn it to the right so it locks in. It should be straight up and down in the locked in position. Okay?

I'll come over and do the same thing over here. Check it. It looks pretty great. The filament is not broken. Nothing the moving around. I didn't touch the glass. I'm going to bring it over. I'm going to turn it all the way counterclockwise as far as I can until it grabs. I'm going to bring it back to the right. Once it sets in we'll bring it down. It's locked. It's in the straight up and down position. All ears are in. Cool.

Now we're going to grab this. We've got our little triangle ear here. It's going to slide over that just like this, sets in. We're going to do the same thing to the other side. We've got two bolts. Okay? Easy peasy.

All right, so I've got my bolts. I'm just going to take them and I'm just going to put them in. There we are. Get this one. Here. This one. Very nice. Everything feels great. We'll bring it back down, we'll finish up with the top, and we should be all done.

Okay, so now it's time to put these up up along the top, right? We've got our little clips here, right? Like I said, if you looked at this and you didn't see the metal clip, it's probably inside these holes right here. If that was the case, you'd want to just take them out, okay? You can you do something like a pocket screwdriver or whatever you have to do. Get them out of there, put them back on this. Okay? You can't just go ahead and put this plastic into those metal clips if they're down there, they just don't like to work that way.

Anyway, we're going to line up these with these holes, being careful not to scratch any of our paint. Just like always, we try real hard to do a good job here. It slides under there. Put this up here. Get our holes lined up. Just give it a little bonk. Bonk, bonk. Put this in there.

Okay. We've got four push clips. One here, one there, here, and there. Okay? You can do them in any order. You do you, booboo. Slide them in and then push in the center. Okay? Slide it in, push the center. Wk move onto the last. Slide it in, push it in the center. Put this under here. This should go right in there. Very nice. Okay.

We can get this puppy lined up. There's just the little hole in it right there. That's slides over this, okay? It's just kind of like a rain drip guard type of deal. Here we are. It looks pretty great. We'll do the same to the other side and then we're all set.

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