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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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 feel like i just watched 4 seasons of a great TV show and now I have to wait a week for each episode to come out for the fifth
go on OHR...
Man the suspense! Great write up.Thanks man, I think we're in the final season, there might be a Big Bend episode if I can squeeze it in before this motor dies....
The TE450 ran like a damn champ, it flew through the creek ride like it did 3 years ago, it powered up the climbs with guts to spare, I think I fell once and it was a fluke really, the Husky handles so good, it's nearly always my fault.
A strange thing happened, and it happened 6 months ago on this same ride. 6 months ago, we rode up Palomas Gap, heading towards the climb up to 7000 foot Timber Mtn, the Husky blew the speedo/fan fuse, and I didnt realize it and I was lucky to hang onto most of my rad fluid, although I skipped a nasty hill climb because I knew the bike was overheating, I just didnt realize why. This trip, the SAME fuse blew out in the SAME place. after climbing up Palomas Gap and heading towards Timer Mtn, I noticed my speedo was out and this year, finally, I realized my fan wouldn't be working, so I replaced the fuse and it stayed good the entire rest of that day and the next day. Very strange if you ask me.
And here's the really weird thing that happened that is still not fully explained but I have a corrective action that I hope will fix it.
At the end of Day One, we came back down Palomas Gap, down into the Rio Grande river basin. We were just be-bonkin' along, not racing, the bike had gone 80 hard miles with NO issue other than the blown fuse. So while we were just puttin' down the sandy bank of the Rio Grande, the bike sputters and dies, like it's out of gas, but the tank is 3/4 full from a stop we had made and dumped in our gas bottles. Crank the starter, she starts up, goes 100 yards, sputters and dies. Crank it up, with the starter grinding for awhile, she starts up, goes 200 yards and dies. It did this for awhile until I finally caught my buddy and said I was headed in, we were done for the day anyway, it was about 5pm and we were beat. I got back to the hotel, pulled the pump, looking for a split hose or loose hose clamp, nothing doing, all OK with the pump, PLUS the bike ran perfectly all the way back to town, about 10-12 miles.
Jump to Day Two, a 160 mile day, 30-40 water crossings, a climb to 10,000 feet, 60 mph run down a graded dirt road, all perfect. Got to the end of the day, 5pm again, came down a rough jeep road, got into the tiny town of Chloride, and the bike sputters and dies, like it's out of gas. Same time of day and end of the ride as yesterday. Crank it up, it runs 100 yards and dies. Over and over until we get out of town and I run it up to 70mph on the pavement and I keep it pinned all the way back to the trucks. Ran perfect, like a rocket.
I've thought long and hard on it, and I am deciding it's most likely the fuel pump. It's an automotive pump, I put it in June 2013 and I think it's just not really cut out for dirt bike duty. 2 things make me think this. 1st, the great CAcycleworks pump that I ran for 2.5 years met its maker on a hard suspension hit, there's no doubt in my mind, the fuel pump died on a very hard hit on a buried water pipe.. I did a major flying W, came down, the pump was gone, it never turned again, with 12v put right to it, it wouldn't make a sound. From this I know, the pump in my bike gets knocked around since I have a sub-standard mounting arrangement. 2nd reason to think it's the pump: on Day One, when I caught up to my buddy, we were listening to the pump prime and it was making this high pitched sound before it shifted into the more normal, low pitched sound. I've heard the high pitch sound before, mostly when reinstalling a dry ump and its initial prime when dry. But this was a fully wet pump in a 3/4 full tank.
Long post, simple decision really, I'm going back to the CAcycleworks pump I used for 2.5 years. I have one more ride tomorrow on the Toyota pump, it should make one more trip.
