• 4 Stroke Husqvarna Motorcycles Made In Italy - About 1989 to 2014
    TE = 4st Enduro & TC = 4st Cross

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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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

Broken cam chain = big mess

dirthead1

Husqvarna
AA Class
Big bummer. I have a 2007 TC450 with less than 20 hours on it and the timing chain broke due to there being a valve shim dropped into the engine and left there by the factory.

Such a bummer. The engine had never been opened or serviced due to the low hours on the bike. It sat for almost 3 years. And yes the other four valve shims are still in place.

On the lighter side of things, does anyone have suggestions for internal upgrades for the rebuild? Valves? Piston? Cams?
 
I would doubt if it was there from the factory. Maybe the previous owner dropped one. The reason I say this is I'm willing to bet the heads are completely assembled and the shims in place before the head gets bolted to the motor.
 
Motosportz;72086 said:
I would doubt if it was there from the factory. Maybe the previous owner dropped one. The reason I say this is I'm willing to bet the heads are completely assembled and the shims in place before the head gets bolted to the motor.

Nope I know for a fact this engine was never opened. You can't even put the head on with the cams in place...the nuts that hold the head to the cylinder are under the cams...
 
You might want to send a note and pics to Husky NA.

Before BMW bought Husky, it was not unheard of for Husky NA (ferracci) to go the extra mile when it was clearly a factory mistake.

that included bikes on their second owner, bikes a couple years old, etc.

Rob Keith used to get on the internet and personally take an interest, and often go the distance, it was really awesome.

of course things are all corporate and cold now so who knows, but doesnt hurt to ask.

upgrades for an '07?
that was a very very good year. only thing i would consider is hybrid ceramic crank bearings, its a 6302 if memory serves me, and its got one metal seal.
 
Thanks for the response.

With the help of GP motorcycles, my local shop, for parts, it's already back together. After having been on Hondas and Yamahas for so many years, it sure is cool to have such a good shop to go to. The place is really a dying breed with people that ride and race the bikes they sell and support.

The shop did offer to submit to Husky and see what they said, but I'd rather just fix it myself and go riding this weekend. The fix was basically just a couple of valves, a timing chain, gaskets and lots of cleaning. Luckily, I used to build engines for cars in a machine shop and have also rebuilt thousands of heads.

Fixing it also gave me an opportunity to take a look inside the entire engine and see how they are engineered. Man, the head casting was really good and I didn't see a whole lot more I would have done with a porting tool anyway.

All things considered it was a good experience overall.
 
20 hours??? It should have been serviced at least twice by then! Maybe you'd have found the 'extra' shim, maybe not but 20 hours is too long to run a competition engine before any attention.

Dave
 
dirthead1;72673 said:
Fixing it also gave me an opportunity to take a look inside the entire engine and see how they are engineered. Man, the head casting was really good and I didn't see a whole lot more I would have done with a porting tool anyway.


That's because it thinks it's a Ducati. :lol:
 
Husky Sport;74718 said:
20 hours??? It should have been serviced at least twice by then! Maybe you'd have found the 'extra' shim, maybe not but 20 hours is too long to run a competition engine before any attention.

Dave
Why would I have had the ignition cover off to service the bike anyway? That just doesn't make sense.
 
Husky Sport;74718 said:
20 hours??? It should have been serviced at least twice by then! Maybe you'd have found the 'extra' shim, maybe not but 20 hours is too long to run a competition engine before any attention.

Dave

All I know is my new TE250 better last the whole enduro season this year w/o anything but oil air filter and a few valve adjustments.

My Yamaha Wr400 lasted 10 years and is still going strong with the same program.
 
dirthead1;74839 said:
Why would I have had the ignition cover off to service the bike anyway? That just doesn't make sense.


As I said maybe or maybe not have found it, it depends on where the shim was dropped and how long it took to make its way down to do some damage.

I've seen extra shims in motors before (Not Husky but Kawasaki) and on two occasions they had been found sat in the head on the first service before they had the chance to do any damage.

Dave
 
Yes, I guess I should hold myself responsible for this happening and not the manufacturer. Thanks. And 20 hours was an estimate. It's probably not even half that.
 
dirthead1;75139 said:
Yes, I guess I should hold myself responsible for this happening and not the manufacturer. Thanks. And 20 hours was an estimate. It's probably not even half that.

Valves should be checked every 10 hrs but if the shim was a fifth wheel then of course it wasn't your fault. Take the ignition cover off about every 2nd time you change oil filters[every other oil change for me] to do a visual & clean the magnets ect. Sometimes it gets messy in there. :)
 
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