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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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!
I have been riding for 35 plus years. I have been through this a million times. Expensive to cheap. Bought a stack of bearings off eBay for cheap. They dont last long. Bought some very expensive ones, get destroyed just like the rest because we ride in lots of mud and water here in the NW. I go with the All Balls kits now. They are complete, good quality and last about as long as any bearing is going to under these conditions. The bearings are fine but the seals eventually let mud and dirt in and then they die fast no matter what brand. I use a good waterproof grease (amsoil) and have a small tub I mix the grease and maxilube in as per Tinkens suggestion. Not sure it works as i have not had enough time to deal with it. So I guess what I am saying is for me and my needs the All balls are very good kits, comes with new seals and collars where needed and last as well as most. I always pop the seals regrease and reseal. The grease they use is not as good as what I put in there and there sometimes is not much in there.
I dont care how good your fancy expensive bearings are when they get packed with mud like this. I guess if you were really inclined and had a lot of time you could pop the seal and clean them every 5-10 rides but for me I treat them as sacrificial parts and change them out as needed like brake pads.
