I'm putting in relays to brighten the headlights so I figured I'd get rid of the old horn relay at the same time because it had a burned fuselink wire and looked pretty funky too. The thing that makes me wonder though is the "condenser" looking thing. Can I use a regular 30/40 amp relay in place of the stock horn relay without some ill effect from the absence of this condensor? And if it's so neccessary, why don't they come with a new (read, overly expensive) one?

Im pretty sure thats a noise filter for the radio, someone else may chime in though.

The condenser will absorb the flash at the points making the relay last longer.

Thanks!

The condensor is an RF bypass capacitor and is a shunt element to ground. It will take high frequency pops and clicks and higher frequency ignition noise and shunt it to ground. The value of the condensor is selected to pass the noise to ground while the nature of a capacitor itself is to block DC (otherwise you'd have a dead short to ground). It shouldn't effect anything except the noises. It does have an effect on the hysterisis of the relay coil but that's a story for a different forum.

Chuck