Autonomous Motion

Delta Airzound Bike Horn

Noisemaker for cycling

The Airzound is an air horn that mounts to your bicycle handlebars. You recharge it with an air pump and the reservoir is basically a soda bottle. As a result, the entire assembly is quite lightweight. You can adjust the volume with a small dial. Do watch out that you have it turned back up when refilling the bottle, as it controls flow in and out of the reservoir (one minor design flaw in my opinion).

This air horn was on my shopping list for years though I didn’t have any real need for it until recently. An air horn is way overkill for riding on trails. However, one of the eight bicycles in our household is a Green Gear Bike Friday Family Triple — a bicycle built for three. One thing you don’t realize about riding a tandem or triple with kids is how much of a pain it is to start and stop when you have to coordinate balance with other people. As a result, we tend to do very slow, deliberate rolling stops through stop signs whenever the coast is clear. Though the traffic in our neighborhood is light, I’ve got the horn as an added measure to make sure we’re seen.

It’s freaking loud!

Most of the time I just give two quick toots to people who are amused to see a bicycle built for three. I’ve only blasted it once to someone who was backing out of a driveway and clearly hadn’t seen me. Again, not for trails or pedestrians, but perfect for riding in traffic where you have to complete with stereos and contend with closed windows.

The makers say you get 50 blasts with the supplied reservoir (16-oz. plastic soda bottle) but I upgraded mine to a 1-liter bottle. Now I can blast all day and not worry about running out of air, and it’s always right there affixed to my handle bars.

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-- Yitah Wu 04/21/09

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