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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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

Cantilever Suspended Husky

Additional pics of frames with long-travel suspensions from the mid 70's:

Profab bolt-together frame:

profab - Copy.jpg

and what looks like a C&J frame?:

C&J - Copy.jpg
 
Profab bolt-together frame:
Click to expand...

Weren't all these early bolt together frames titanium? BTW this setup needs a banana swingarm, although that may create too much of an angle for the shocks.
 
The number and type of the GP bolt-together frames have a bit of a mystery surrounding them. According to VMX issue #1 featuring Bengt Aberg’s bike, there were both Ti and “high tensile steel” (possibly CrMo) versions. The Ti version had a limited use span, supposedly 10 races, while the “high tensile steel” could last the season. The weight difference, it seems, was minor. The bike featured in the magazine as Bengt Aberg’s bike #72X3605 has a “high tensile steel” frame which some say are rarer than the Ti as less were made.

The ‘lay-down’ shock frame pictured above was being sold as a ‘roller’ – hence the temporary shocks that are much too long, resulting in an exaggerated swingarm angle. The shocks the frame was originally designed for were more probably closer to the OEM Husky shock length at the time of about 11.9”. The Kramer Maicos, with a suspension similar to the very first bike pictured in this thread, used 11.9” Bilsteins.
 
I would say that the ProFab frame was the likely prototype for the GP frame on the Mikkola original. I saw in a Torsten hallman interview that Husqvarna routinely used ProFab for ideas back in the day.
 
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