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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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

Fork Rebound

Dave Mills

Dave Mills

Husqvarna
AA Class
I have 40mm forks with Race Tech Emulators, Race Tech piston bands, and springs spec'd for my weight (240#) and all was installed as per the Race tech instructions including drilling the damper rods. I am running 15w oil, and the bike has very little (if any) rebound damping. Is there a way to get more rebound without adversely affecting the compression damping?
 
Oil weight is your only adjustment for rebound damping and compression damping is isolated by the RT emulator.
That's not to say heavier oil will not effect compression damping though.
When you change to heavier oil you will also have to re-adjust your compression settings, but that's what makes the emulators useful.
For your weight I would suggest using the yellow 60 psi springs on your emulators, as this will allow you to use less preload on the emulator.
Excess preload will make your mid stroke feel harsh.
I also drilled 2 extra holes in the top plate to soften the slow speed damping. But try yours first.
You can always drill the extra holes later. They were probably needed for me, because I switched to 20 wt oil for more rebound damping also.

Here's my understanding:

Bleed holes control slow speed damping
Emulator spring preload controls mid stroke damping
Emulator spring rate controls high speed damping
 
I understand. I believe that I already have the yellow springs in. Did the 20w make a noticeable difference?
 
The 20wt did make it feel better. I could feel the forks stroking in and out through the travel with 15wt Bel-Ray. Using 20wt Bel-Ray now and don't notice the forks stroking anymore.

Biggest improvement came when I drilled the top plate. Just added 2 more holes like the original 2.
Feels much more plush over slow speed bumps and rocks, yet feels much more planted on high speed trails. Before the front wheel felt loose, kind of bouncing off everything I hit at high speed.

I have 35mm forks and it took quite a while to dial in the forks, but I'm very happy with them now.

My son has 40mm's on his bike with all the RT stuff and he's running 15wt. He's pretty happy with his forks, but his set up is nothing like mine.

He still has the blue (40psi) spring with 5 turns of preload on the emulator. I keep telling him to switch to the yellow spring and back off the preload to soften the mid stroke, but he doesn't want me to mess with it.

He weighs about 215 lbs with gear and has .48kg springs with 3/8" preload, 15 wt Bel-Ray at 5 inches from the top with the standard holes in the top plate.
 
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