Andrew Speakman

I  did this review of the AirZound in January 2006 

During the winter months it goes without saying that a decent set of bike lights in good working order are essential. Check your batteries, go LED if you are sick of keeping Duracell in the money. Reflective clothing is also an important addition.

Even when a cyclist is equipped with blazing arrays of lights and reflectors, some road users aren’t cyclist aware and will only see larger vehicles. What is needed is the ability to trigger off another of their senses - if they can see and hear you they’ve got no excuse. The traditional and polite way to do this is with a bell, but bells just can’t cut through the crack of a 100 watt snare drum, pumping out of a blacked out Honda Civic.

In comes the 115 decibel AirZound 3, a novel Canadian invention that in keeping with cycling uses human power alone. Just use a normal bike pump to squeeze 80 PSI into an air reservoir that fits into a standard bottle holder and you’ll get over 30 air horn blasts. The trouble is you’ll have so much fun 30 blasts won’t last long and you’ll have to top up. I bought mine from http://www.cyclesense.co.uk/ for £17.95 plus £2.50 postage.

In follow up to this review I have a few more comments based on three months’ use:

• For £20, the horn feels very flimsy. You are probably paying for the design, and small-scale production.
• I don’t know if the mount for the horn is supposed to be quick release, but I’ve been detaching the horn when parking in public places. The horn detaches so easily that and it has fallen off once whilst riding. I’m not sure how many releases it will take before it becomes too loose to stay in place.
• The air reservoir is quite small, I need to top it up once a week. When it loses pressure, it rapidly goes from blisteringly loud to to no-so-loud.
• It is high pitched compared with car horns, so even though it is loud, it doesn’t always have the impact expected.
• The AirZound gives me extra confidence, I have ridden with the horn out of gas, and felt exposed and at risk
• Pedestrians leap out of the way if hooted.
• Cars hoot back after recovering from the shock.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 27th, 2006 at 10:44 pm and is filed under cycling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.