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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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

1984 500XC fork/brake questions

Huskerdoo

Huskerdoo

Husqvarna
AA Class
OK, here's the deal: The DLS setup is horrible on this bike. I tried the following to make it better: arced the shoes per instructions in this forum, new brake cable, deglazed hub, lengthen the brake arm. I can still over power the brake when pushing the bike. The shoes are stock, but after doing all this and still no improvement I am very hesitant spend the $$ on a different shoe and still have it suck. I'm thinking of getting front end from a 1987-88 Honda CR, reasons being I want to keep the convention fork look of the bike and add a disc brake. would the 43mm forks fit in the Husky clamps? If not would it be harmful to mill out the husky clamps so they fit? Or am I better off swapping the entire front end? Unless someone can tell me where to get a "miracle" DLS shoe for relatively cheap. I love the speed and stability of this bike, I hate the front brake thats wimpier than my 10 speed mountain bike
 
Huskerdoo said:
OK, here's the deal: The DLS setup is horrible on this bike. I tried the following to make it better: arced the shoes per instructions in this forum, new brake cable, deglazed hub, lengthen the brake arm. I can still over power the brake when pushing the bike. The shoes are stock, but after doing all this and still no improvement I am very hesitant spend the $$ on a different shoe and still have it suck. I'm thinking of getting front end from a 1987-88 Honda CR, reasons being I want to keep the convention fork look of the bike and add a disc brake. would the 43mm forks fit in the Husky clamps? If not would it be harmful to mill out the husky clamps so they fit? Or am I better off swapping the entire front end? Unless someone can tell me where to get a "miracle" DLS shoe for relatively cheap. I love the speed and stability of this bike, I hate the front brake thats wimpier than my 10 speed mountain bike
Click to expand...

The cheapest and easiest route would be to use a 1987 - 88 front fork, wheel, and brake. My 88 had a descent front fork and disc brake.
 
Thanks Husky jim, I have considered that route. Although in my area I'll probably have to get it off ebay. There is a motorcycle salvage yard not far from home, I'm fairly sure I'd have better luck finding Honda forks there.
 
Change shoes, clean drum 60 grit sand paper,set the shoe timing properly.
You will be to lock it up, but won't have any braking when going backwards.
If you are trying to get a disc brake type of braking power it isn't going to happen.
The dual leading shoe did work better than the single leading shoe, only problem like I said no trailing shoe for going backwards. Absolutly won't stop it.
On paper the dual leading shoe brake should have twice the braking power of a single leading shoe.
You see Husky had the patent on anti skid brakes ( you couldn't get them to lock up to save your arse).
Later George
 
Huskerdoo said:
Thanks Husky jim, I have considered that route. Although in my area I'll probably have to get it off ebay. There is a motorcycle salvage yard not far from home, I'm fairly sure I'd have better luck finding Honda forks there.
Click to expand...

Where are you located? I have several spare sets of forks from 86-88 let me know if I can help.
If your going the ebay route I would go modern 96-01 Honda should work but you will have to get the right bearing races. I also hear that you can use 04-09 Honda (showa) crf250-450
 
Up-tite: what do you mean by shoe timing? I did run 80 grit to deglaze the hub. I'm not expecting disc power, but my single-leading 82 Maico easily outbrakes the Husky set-up. To bad there aren't any places around here that reline pads, I would try something with better friction properties. Thanks for the input.

Husky jim: Thanks, I live by Erie, PA. I'll keep you mind, although I think I'm going to put off replacing the front end a month or two. Seems the transfer case on my plow truck now needs a redo and the snow isn't to far off....priorities:(
 
By timing he means you have to adjust the linkage connecting the two brake shoe cams so they work together. If they are not timed to work at EXACTLY the same time, you basically have no brake at all. If set up right the DLS is very powerful for a drum, but I prefer the simpler single leading shoe, less powerful but always works and in both directions.
 
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