• 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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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!

1973 Desert Master

1982 XC 430

1982 XC 430

Husqvarna
AA Class
Hello, a buddy has a 1973 Husqvarna 400 Desert Master that he has had for a wile and now wants to part with. Its in tuff shape in need of a full resto. He sez its rare, I know my early 80's Huskys but don't know much about early 70's. Searching Google I see that it is probably a 450 and not a 400. I know it would be worth a lot if Malcolm Smith came with it but not much more than that. I see that a restored one sold for big bucks on ebay in 2010. Did they only build a few, or is there another reason they worth more than another Husky of the same era? Thanx....
 
Somewhat rare bikes since they flopped with low sales. however; to the right person they are collectable but not really a vintage MX race bike. Just my .02.
 
The Desert Master was a 450WR with a larger yellow fuel tank. I think they lost sales to the 400WR of the era for desert and long distance racing. It is worth restoring if you can do most work yourself and stay away from powdercoat if you want it to be collectable
 
By the early 70's HVA learned that they were doing just as good if not better in the desert than on the MX track. Its my belief that they felt the need to produce a bike specifically for the desert racing market. There wasn't a lot of money back then to budget for a completely re-engineered product so HVA used what they had on the shelf to create a bike that appeared to cater specifically to the desert market.

I have a special affection for the desert master, as I was fortunate enough to get a new one when I was 16. I raced it for a couple years and have to say it was a blast. I just finished restoring a 73 DM that I purchased used 20 years ago, and just sold it recently on Ebay. The one I got when I was 16 is still in the garage. The two DM bikes I've owned had a couple of unique traits. One, they had two secondary coil mounts on the frame possibly to setup a means to switch a fouled plug on the fly but to my knowledge was never used, and secondly they came with the combination of a CR trans with a Femsa ignition. Why the CR trans I don't know but it was common knowledge at the time that the 5 spd CR motor had the Motoplat ignition. For those weekly 100 mile hare and hounds the Femsa was more dependable in those days. The DM also came with the Magura dual cable throttle control although they only utilized one cable. Interestingly the DM used the 2034 engine number prefix that most folks today identify as a 1974 motor. The two 1973 DM's I've owned both have had the 2034 prefix with MK frame numbers below 10,000 indicating a 1973 bike.


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Thanx for the Heads up. Would there of been a DM that would of come with Plastic Fenders ? Maybe one that a pro rider would of used. Not aftermarket, Plastic from the factory.
 
Not to my knowledge. Plastic fenders were very a common replacement for the stock aluminum fenders because the aluminum fenders were bent up after a couple of bad crashes. I imagine its the main reason Preston Petty fenders did so well then. In 1974 HVA started including plastic Falk fenders on their bikes. Maybe the previous owner of the DM you're interested in put a pair of these on the bike. They would look stock because the 73 fender mounts were identical to the 74 making the Falk fenders a perfect fit.
 
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