From your description, it sounds like the clock spring is coming apart. That's a wound-up ribbon cable in a plastic housing under the steering wheel. Those are used on vehicles with air bags in the steering wheel, to insure a solid and reliable electrical connection. On models of this era, there was a separate circuit for the horn switch. When the ribbon cable starts to fall apart, those circuits can touch and cause the horn to blow intermittently.
What is more worrisome is if the cable is deteriorating, you know the same thing is happening to all of the circuits in it. Two of those are for the "squib", or "initiator" circuit for the air bag. For demonstration purposes, we can light off an air bag with a little 9-volt transistor battery. In the car, that is done by the computer switching 12 volts onto the squib circuit. Now you have bare 12-volt horn wires that could potentially touch a bare squib wire. While we almost never hear of it, this is what could cause an air bag to fire unexpectedly. There are so many safeguards built into the system, but they can't protect from bare and shorted wires in the clock spring.
Here's links to a couple of related articles:
https://www.2carpros.com/articles/symptoms-of-a-bad-airbag-clock-spring
https://www.2carpros.com/articles/steering-wheel-clock-spring-removal
Jun 5, 2019 at 5:33 PM
