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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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

How many air cooled XC500's out there?

Old Geezer

Old Geezer

Husqvarna
A Class
I lurk around this forum just like many closet vintage bikers, seeing posts about XC bikes, but they all seem to be water cooled mid to late 80's. WTF, doesn't anyone ride the classic air cooled earlier bikes? I know they have their problems, but jeeze...am I all alone with my '83 XC500?

Granted, it still isn't running yet (but back when it was, it was a fine machine) and if I would just stop dicking around with my bro's CR500 (another damn water pumper, of course!) I might yet resurrect my bike. What's the deal, are all these just rotting in a landfill somewhere, or are they slowly gaining cult status?
 
Yeap, not alot of any Big bore Husky were sold, remember Husky were honed racing bikes , you had to be a serious
rider to afford one & wanted to win. It was too easy to go to the Yam/Suz/Kaw dealer and buy a bike to putt around
in the woods etc. & at 1/2 the price of a Husky.

But more then likely more of those bike are in the scrap heap, then the guys who loved racing their Huskys. Husky were expensive, built not to break,cause that's how you finish. Things that are built well last

When i've got my 390,430's or 500 out, more & more people come up to me & say, i had one of those, man i wish i had it still, or man i always wanted one, after reading dirt bike's test back in the day...

It's all about passion :D that's why i have 5 Husky Big bores

Husky John
 
I think Husky sold more 390s and 430s than anything else, but by the time the 500s came out they were really outclassed by the Japanese open class bikes, and of course the Maico and KTM. By the time the 82.5 500 came out, the '83 Honda CR480 was about to come out and as much as I like Husky, no one but a die hard Husky fan would buy it over that CR480 Honda. The Honda was better in every way except high speed stability and cost a LOT less.
 
everfree said:
Hey Michel,
Nice picture. Looks like a 86 water-cooled 500.
Is that you riding it? :-)

Can you translate the title into English? Does it say: "... giant torque monster!" :-)

Dave
Click to expand...

Its a 1000 twin, two Husky 500 top ends, out of a sidecar.
 
Donno, I never heard of the bike, but I was able to use some of the French I took in high school to make that much out of the story. Also, if you look you can see the K&N style pod air filter behind the riders leg, on a single it would not stick out like that.
 
everfree said:
Hey Michel,
Nice picture. Looks like a 86 water-cooled 500.
Is that you riding it? :-)

Can you translate the title into English? Does it say: "... giant torque monster!" :-)

Dave
Click to expand...
It is a 1000 Folan 2 stroke ( 2 x 500 HVA LC tops end).
The title is " I won Le Touquet". Le Touquet is a famous
beach race in north of France created by Thierry Sabine ( creator also of Paris-Dakar).
Now the name is enduropale.
The bike was raced by Laurent Pidoux in Supermotard.
But too much power .
100-120 Hp depending of the pipe.

The article is just for trying that bike.
Frame is from a 510 TELC.
You can see 2 in 1 pipe in some pics.
 
I restored 1 for a friend and might have another 500 myself.
Got a tip on a 84 500 XC, waiting to see it.
 
How many of these have you seen? Two pipes into one, now there's some advanced thinking, (think again).







 
My CR and WR 500's
CR has now another (better) tank and front wheel. WR is in line for restoration.

P3050135.JPG P7250118_s.jpg
 
I think the air cooled 500 in the white frame is my favorite though I don't have it in running shape any more. What happened in my case was by the time I had the footpegs worn down to the point that I welded on some metal and sharpened the parts that touch the boots the bike was pretty well worn out though I didn't know it at the time. Soon after that I had to swap out the clutch and starting gears as the origional ones wore out, and soon after that the big end of the crankshaft went. The origional owner and I got a lot of use out of it and I still have the clutch cover in use. It gets to the point where a new left over bike makes more sense, everything is new. At one point a rear hub cost $400 and a new 51cc husky chainsaw cost $259, can kind of cool off one's drive. I did fix up the rear of a water cooled engine and put the 83 xc500 back into service for a while but one enduro the swingarm pivot was loose at the gas stop and then again at the finish, the hole in the frame had oblonged and I migrated the engine to a silver frame with extended wheelbase. The 500 seems to have a divided transfer port on the sides where the air cooled 430 doesn't. Both have that feature in the water cooled version. The pipe is quite hard to damage compared to most any water cooled bike especially the larger ones with pipe to smash on both sides of the bike. The xc 500 seems to be pretty common for sale over the last 5 to ten years or so. The guy I bought mine form did buy an 86 cr 500 honda, he clearly didn't go for the earlier one mentioned in a post above. Paid $28xx for it, my 88 te510 was sold for 25xx those are the only ones I got the origional purchace reciept.

fran
 
I have original 3x 500XC. 83, 84 AC and LC 85. (as per frame and engine no's)
These machines were built and geared for desert racing. they ran 39/70 crank to 7-plate clutch set-ups which spun the gearbox internals way faster than WR or CR. With this came clutch slippage an much quicker gearbox wear rates, and particularly the kicker gear behind clutch baskets and idler and kick-start gear bearings went south at quite a rate (when not replaced regularly), which resulted in many engines destroyed as the idler jammed the kicker gear blowing the rest apart.

For this reason and also the fact that original XC clutch baskets in good condo are very rare I run WR 8-plate clutch set-ups.
Clocked a WR clutched stock XC at 103mph during an officially timed speed event, and have since obtained a perfect XC basket from huskydogg to install and establish how fast these machines really can go.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top