• Husqvarna Motorcycles Made In Sweden - About 1988 and older

  • Hi everyone,

    As you all know, Coffee (Dean) passed away a couple of years ago. I am Dean's ex-wife's husband and happen to have spent my career in tech. Over the years, I occasionally helped Dean with various tech issues.

    When he passed, I worked with his kids to gather the necessary credentials to keep this site running. Since then (and for however long they worked with Coffee), Woodschick and Dirtdame have been maintaining the site and covering the costs. Without their hard work and financial support, CafeHusky would have been lost.

    Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working to migrate the site to a free cloud compute instance so that Woodschick and Dirtdame no longer have to fund it. At the same time, I’ve updated the site to a current version of XenForo (the discussion software it runs on). The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.

    Unfortunately, the new software version doesn’t support importing the old site’s styles, so for now, you’ll see the XenForo default style. This may change over time.

    Coffee didn’t document the work he did on the site, so I’ve been digging through the old setup to understand how everything was running. There may still be things I’ve missed. One known issue is that email functionality is not yet working on the new site, but I hope to resolve this over time.

    Thanks for your patience and support!

1971 Aluminum Frame Big-Clutch Engine Husqvarna

V

Vinskord

Husqvarna
AA Class
A little quiet around here lately so thought a bit of HVA history would be of interest. Here are some pics of Husqvarna’s 1971 aluminum frame project and eventual demise.


The following are abbreviated excerpts from Husqvarna Success by Gunnar Lindstrom.

Part 1

The engine used was the soon to be released Big-Clutch 250cc for 1972. The frame was constructed with aluminum tubing bonded with aircraft adhesive to cast aluminum bosses. This was of interest to Husqvarna as it could lead to a simple, light, and inexpensive frame to enter into production.

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Part 2

At the 1971 Swiss Grand Prix, Thorleif Hansen’s frame broke on a downhill jump. Heikki Mikkola was told to sit out the second moto in concern that his frame would also break. The break was attributed to a poor casting, but Husqvarna thought the negative publicity was too embarrassing and ended the aluminum frame project.

A5 - Copy.jpgA6 - Copy.jpg
 
Great story. Too bad the failure didn't happen in testing. They might have tried another design. "What if."
I hope Hansen wasn't hurt? And I bet Heikki didn't take lightly to have to miss that race, but I understand.
 
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