<VV> 1960 Horn Slots
peter koehler
pkoehler01 at atlanticbb.net
Sun Feb 19 08:16:01 EST 2012
The three vertical slots in the lower valance below the
front bumper of early 1960's can be seen in most of the
pre-production advertising photos and in the service
manuals. Seeing them on an actual car is a much rarer
sight. Only four "horn-slot" cars are known to exist. The
green one pictured in the previous post is #428 off the
line at Willow Run, Michigan and it is the newest Corvair
with that feature. Two other horn-slot cars reside in
Michigan (#375 and #407) and the oldest known surviving
Corvair is #272 that lives in Ontario, Canada. All four of
these cars were built within several days of each other.
All of this happened before the first week of production
at Willow Run was completed.
The story goes that the engineers found that the horn
slots allowed road dirt and debris to collect in the horns
and actually render them inoperative. The design was
supposed to let the horns work better. The location of the
horns was moved up under the headlight buckets and away
from the lower valance panel. Even the cars with the horn
slots have the re-located horns. GM was just using up
metal stampings that they ran before the change in the
horn location. Why waste good front stampings?
If you do get a chance to check out a real horn-slot '60
look at the right hand side of the lower valance. There
are three similar indentations in the panel to make the
slots on the left side. Perhaps the plan was to open these
slots up if a car was built with dual horns? I dunno. What
do you think? - Caveman Pete
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