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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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

'73 400CR The journey begins....

TexasMule

Husqvarna
B Class
Been looking for an MK Husky for many years. Finally found one in pretty decent shape.

i-BV2NQJ6-XL.jpg


So now the journey begins. It appears to me to be a very low hour bike. I pulled the head and it looked unbelievably clean.

i-ptS36r6-XL.jpg


That's after wiping the oil off with a paper towel.

I think it's the original piston. Standard bore is 81.50 and it's stamped 8142 ????? Not sure
what the 52/110 means.

i-bqXwvSP-XL.jpg


Here's the piston before I cleaned it up for the photo. I used to race Huskys and this
is in better shape than after 3-4 races.

i-hqBB7n4-XL.jpg


I have one last question for the evening. It appears someone may have performed a
LeFevre frame modification on the bike.

i-rmMfKDZ-XL.jpg


Because the gas tank doesn't fit over the rear bolt hole.

i-KDzxFzP-XL.jpg


It's been a few (45) years since I worked on Huskys, thought maybe some of the experts
on this forum could help me out.

Thanks,
Bill
 
Very nice! Wouldn't mind having that in my garage, although it wouldn't be as clean. Curious if the frame mod improves turning ability (as stated on Johns site) enough to make it worth while. I'm not a motocross guy so I don't know how to turn anyways.
 
As I said in a previous post. John does his frame modification BEHIND the rear tank mount, not in front.

Someone else will have to chime in if the modification improves turning ability. I haven't raced/ridden this bike since I got it.
 
Being curious about the frame mod I checked out LeFevres website and it looks like he doesn't cut the backbone, only the sub-frame where it meets the backbone. Then he makes two small bends in each of the two the sub-frame struts. Also looks like he makes a bend in the rear fender loop.

By cutting the backbone it looks like a different approach was used on your bike. Its interesting the different ideas implemented back in those days.

I remember seeing a motorcycle magazine article long ago of someone offering to turn an MJ or MK frame into a cantilever setup (i.e. lay down shocks).

frame2b.jpg

frame3b.jpg

frame5b.jpg
 
John's mod is simple and very effective. He did it on my 73 400CR. He moves the forward seat tubing up and forward (yellow arrow), which creates a slight bend in the seat stay tube (blue circles).


IMG_7062.jpg
 
It creates a much flatter seat profile and allows you to get forward more easily. It works.
Yes, I know this is the wrong tank! This was the mock up.

IMG_6998.jpg
 
It creates a much flatter seat profile and allows you to get forward more easily.
Wouldn't a flat seat, vs a forward slanted one, help with staying on the rear of the seat will less effort. From a grumpy old desert racers perspective, that would help reduce fatigue in a 100mile H&H.
 
Hey Crash, I get what you're saying. I feel it makes the seat tank transition much flatter. I actually sit right on the back of that tank in some corners. It was harder to do that before the mod.
 
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