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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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

83 case composition

1982 XC 430 said:
Maybe we could go back to the Paint subject. Like what etching Primer and what Paint has been used with sucess. I don't want this to happen again!
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Don't chuck it , just machine the crook bit out and call it a 400/430.
I would like to know what the original paint was .
 
dukkman said:
Don't chuck it , just machine the crook bit out and call it a 400/430.
I would like to know what the original paint was .
Click to expand...

Hi all,
Met with folks with that were family partners in the former Kal Guard product just Wednesday. They are now in Austin Tx. I am more than impressed with product. Its not new.
Main purpose was to stop corrosion. It is used in military. It is carburetor cleaner proof , acid proof , almost scratch proof. I am going to do a set of cases soon. Oh it comes in all colors also - thinking of doing frame, hubs, shocks, etc. It is what folks do for gun coating. think of how hard and smooth a gun barrel is. It is real hard and thin. Its baked on. (Funny thing is I just also found a set of NOS cases to use for next 430)

This will be my next rebuild.

I love the fact that it is thin - powder coating just is too thick. Regular paint chips and does not stick well at least for me.

The old finish in the husky cases is some kind of dip/spin coating then baked on. (from old husky guy) It is tough. Just as above I have never had carburetor cleaner remove husky case paint ( unless you let it set for a while) But 30 years of rocks chips and chemicals do- along with good old fresh air.

I would do inside and outside of the mag cases !! The open air will for sure attack the bare mag. I have a few sets of cases here - the ones with scatched areas and inside the crank area that does not have a patina of oil - well the white whiskers show up after oil removed.

Example - I cleaned the built up oil and on a set of older cases with exposed mag. I thought I had it clean. Came back two days later the exposed mag. was white. cleaned again and sprayed just plain old WD 40 and no corrosion showed up.

My goal is once I/we spend the money on these restores I want to stop corrosion as much as possible and keep these bikes looking new for as long as possible

Look for more on this soon. I am also going to do set of rims in gold
 
OK so I ended up Painting the inside of the Crank Area and the Ignition Area with a Paint called Glyptal. Glyptal 1201 is a Enamel Paint that was developed a long long time ago to coat the inside of Electric Motors. It has been used by Engine Builders for the Last 30 or more Years to Coat the inside of Automotive Blocks. They use it to seal the Castings so that if a Grain of the Casting Sand comes loose it won't go threw the Bearings. It also aids in the Oil returning back to the Sump. Although neither of these apply to our Two Strokes this Paint has proven its worth in Crank Cases at Race Tracks across the Country. Its not Cheap, $50 a Quart at the Eastwood Company. If You Guys would like I could leave my Restoration for dead in a Barn and open it up in 15 Years or so and let You know how the Paint held up.
 
This is a great discussion. I'd like to add a few items with regard to the Magnesium engine cases.
Coating: I did a lot of research in terms of an anti-corrosion coating for the magnesium. If you proceed to lightly soda blast the paint off the engine cases, you will see a yellowish iridescent coating under the paint. This is most likely a "Conversion Coating" similar to Dow 7 or Dow 19. This Dow specification is a chemical process that uses a very toxic chemical to produce a coating on the magnesium in the form of a protective "skin" by reacting with the magnesium on the surface. This skin then protects the underlying magnesium from further oxidation. The resulting skin turns out to be a fantastic base for primer and paint. With regards to 1982XC430's post about the Glyptal, I find that solution very interesting. I was told by another member to try this a while back, but never attempted. My only gripe with the Glyptal paint was that I couldn't find it in black, only red.
Material Properties: The density of magnesium is about 2/3 that of aluminum, so the magnesium is lighter. As discussed in a previous post, it is the yield and tensile strength properties that determines a materials ability to carry a load without failing. A material's "Modulus of Elasticity" will determine how much a material "deflects" under a given load. It can be imagined as being similar to a spring constant for a coil spring. Magnesium will deflect more than aluminum because it's modulus of elasticity is lower. I have also read that Magnesium can absorb much more energy than aluminum or steel, so it has vibration reducing characteristics. This certainly hasn't been my personal experience riding Husky's, but it is interesting regardless.
 
NYWR430 said:
This is a great discussion. I'd like to add a few items with regard to the Magnesium engine cases.
Material Properties: The density of magnesium is about 2/3 that of aluminum, so the magnesium is lighter. As discussed in a previous post, it is the yield and tensile strength properties that determines a materials ability to carry a load without failing. A material's "Modulus of Elasticity" will determine how much a material "deflects" under a given load.
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I will state straight up that I have not looked up modulus of elasticity for any form cast, extruded tempered or different number alloys of either material. The yeild strength or/and ultimate strength should be beyond the design stresses.

I have observed magnesium welding rod and magnesium screed for placing concrete. If you take the welding rod and tap it against a block of steel it seems more rigid than the aluminum welding rod I have. The magnesium concrete which is like a 2x4 board seems more stiff than the aluminum extrusion stuff they use for commercial glass store front glass installations which is aluminum. I can't say how many pounds per foot for honest comparison.

If something is two thirds the density than you can make a part with a larger cross section for the same weight. Larger cross section=stronger in most all cases. One can run into similar with titanium which (again more or less common alloys not pure) the ultimate strength may be higher for it but it flexes more and the parts really ought to be re designed bigger to get to the same flex, as I understand anyway.

It is kind of intresting that for these mag cases there is a steel sleeve for the crank bearings but the aluminun four storke and probably (without checking for sure) automatic cases don't have the insert.

Anyone who wants to pm me and send a postage included padded package, I will be happy to send a piece of pure aluminum.

As for the treatment of the surface. There is good info here but not from me. A lot of this stuff has been dealt with in the airplane industry before I was even born.
 
Interesting regarding the welding rods. In my own experience, I have noticed that the stiffness of the welding rod can vary between alloys of the same material. For aluminum, 5356 filler is stiffer than 4043. There is an interesting story about BSA replicating one of their steel frames in Titanium back in the late 1960's. The company didn't redesign the structure of the frame to increase the section, they simply replaced the steel material with titanium. Although it was lighter than the previous steel frame, it performed miserably because it was too flexible and eventually cracked from fatigue. Maybe I am getting too far off topic here, but it is interesting.

Regarding the steel insert in the magnesium engine case, I don't know its purpose for sure, but I would speculate that the designers thought the crank bearings and seals might be replaced at much greater frequency than the internal transmission bearings that do not have sleeves. Maybe they used them to prevent excessive wear on the magnesium castings during bearing replacement/installation?
 
I am wondering that instead of trying to guess the grade of magnesium welding rod you would need that you could use strips of material cut from a mag Husqvarna case to use instead. I have heard some of the best welds are done with matching parent materials. Just some food for thought...
 
I have a (unscientific) theory that some cases suffer and some don't. Wether its a different run of alloys or just tiny variations in the alloying/casting process I don't know? My cases seem good, the bare/worn parts in the crankcase previously had not corroded so I will leave them bare and rely on regular use to keep them de-oxidised. Also the peening effect of the vapour blasting should help I think.
On the mag subject...I'm currently modding an LC4 KTM ally kickstart to fit. Why put all that effort in to such finely manufactured magnesium casings then fit a kickstart lever that weighs as much as a small car?? I'm still becoming more and more of a fan of the engineers who worked on this engine design though.
 
The problem is all the ethanol in the gas. The ethanol absorbs water and eventually it can settle in the lower part of the crankcase as it separates out of the oil when sitting. This water then reacts with the bare magnesium. I believe this is the cause of the pitting we see in the lower crankcase areas. Keep in mind that this oxidation/pitting happens to cases that had a paint coating on them from the factory. I'm not sure how the bare areas will hold up. I also believe that the cases that experienced a lot of pitting probably were sitting idle for a while. I guess if you intend to always start it frequently, then you may be ok. Just something to look out for.
 
I think it is just as well to coat all exposed mag or aluminum with a good internal paint like epoxy based. In the 70's we stuffed the crank of the 175 Yamaha I ended up getting with epoxy saturated corks in the balance holes. The epoxy was unaffected by premix or condensation after 7 years of hard riding(almost daily by teenage me)
 
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