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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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

400CR Shocks

bul_racer

bul_racer

Husqvarna
AA Class
Working on building what I think is a 73 Husky 400CR. MK frame. I need shocks but not sure what they should be. Looked everywhere I can think of and cannot find the rear shock specifications. Possibly the stockers were Girlings & while I do have a set I'm not sure what the length should be & I don't prefer the Girlings because they are not rebuildable. I don't have a large budget so I'm not looking to spend $500-$750 on a set of shocks. Not sure yet how the bike will be used. It's original purpose was moto and I may use it for vintage moto. The swingarm has been modified and has a mounting point directly behind the original so that's a possible option but first I need to determine what stock settings were. Long story short: can anyone tell me the original shock travel, eye to eye length & swingarm travel? Once I know that I can make an informed decision about what shocks to get.

On the bike when I got it were SW 'Stroker' shocks 15 1/4" eye to eye but the shafts are completely rusted and movement frozen so not usable and I have no idea whether they worked well when they worked.

Any help is much appreciated.
 
OEM were Girling - Pic below from Husqvarna parts book - item #6.

Also, pics from Girling catalog with specs -11.9" length and 3.5" travel.

Changing shock length will impact rake and trail - article from Cycle World:

www.cycleworld.com

Understanding a Motorcycle's Rake and Trail

Spec charts sometimes quote rake and trail numbers for a motorcycle chassis, but what does this mean? We have the answer for you.
www.cycleworld.com www.cycleworld.com

Everyone has their favorite brand of shocks. For a period correct look with modern performance, IKON and Hagon are good choices.

73 Parts Manual - Copy.pngG Cat - Copy.JPGG Specs - Copy.jpg
 
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On my MK frame 450 I went a set of vintage 13 inch Works Performance. I wouldn't go any longer than 13" due to what Vinskord mentioned. These WP have a 4 inch stroke length that creates about six inches of rear axle travel with the 75 WR swingarm. These shocks were made available in the mid 70's and IMO are excellent vintage shocks. A few years ago I got into rebuilding vintage shocks to learn more about them and the WP turned out to have the best tunable valving technology and were the easiest to rebuild among the Fox, Boge, Marzocchi, Curnutt and others of the that era.

20261026_090714 25%.jpg

I found these WP on Ebay in the snow mobile section for about $150 plus $70 for seals, orings, schrader valves and oil then another $70 on a set of S&W springs. I called WP and got the valving hole size for cross country riding from the shop guy and drilled the valve ports per his recommendations.

Things to keep in mind include keeping the spring OD at 2" or less so the chain doesn't grind it in two. I created a few millimeters additional spacing between the chain and spring by inserting a 3mm washer between the swingarm and the steel brake plate bushing. I also built a chain tensioner to reduce the excess chain slop from flying around. Prior to 1972 there were few aftermarket shock choices so Husky wasn't particularly concerned about this chain clearance issue.
 
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