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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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

husky 430cr

the engines are not numbered to the frames. the frames state what year and model they are. long as you have an 85 motor in an 85 frame, it is "correct".

I've also seen late year bikes with the next years plastic, I had a 83-1/2 CR which was sold as a 84. It had a 84 WR tank, 84 seat & side covers & a very high frame serial # for the year & was sold thru a very small dealership in Conn.

Husky made bikes with the parts they had on site, if the model year was wounding down & the next year model were almost ready then some of those parts were used too. There's was NO on time , next day parts delivery back then, what they had, got built.
 
Kartwheel68 said:
All air cooled 430s use the same reed as a 390 because its essentially the same cylinder with a bigger bore and a slightly taller deck height to match the longer stroke.
Click to expand...


Sorry I should of noted air cooled 390 / 420 / 430 use the double reed box setup.

The liquid cooled bikes use the newer rectangle reed box.
 
I guess husqvarna pushed out what bikes they could with the parts supply they had in the early to mid 80's.
The transision to liquid engines had to be tough. Even the change to the single shock.

I still find the twin olin gas shocks the best suspension there ever was even today. There's a frame to swing arm flex I feel on the single shock bikes of today. I feel the rear tire is steering trying to pick another line when leaning. I wonder if the dirt bike designers will see and understand what this flex is doing? Someday thell wake up and say oh look what we discovered "twin shocks"???? DA??

I could go as fast as I wanted too with the twin shocks. The swing arm never bounced. The old front forks wether 38mm or 40mm worked fine. Now today there is so much adjustment in everything we need the engineer who designed it to make it right. My guru bike buddy says the dealer who sells the bike should setup the suspension. At least close for the purchaser. Every new rider thinks you just get on and ride. I get the adjust what? They don't have a clue what's race sag? What's rebound? Then it's the bikes fault when they have problems riding it. Each individual riders weight and style is different. Why are the suspension settings so fine tuned on the newer single shock bikes?
Give it just three settings? Light, medium, hard. Then change rear springs and fork oil weights to set it to the riders weight. Keep it simple? Why so high tech?
 
The 390/420 has a 71mm stroke while the 430 has a 74mm stroke. That's only a 3mm difference. I believe the 420 gets close to the 430 in the bore size?
 
justintendo said:
the later 430 ac used the box style as well
Click to expand...

I've never seen an air cooled 430 with the box reed cage, do you know what year had the box reed? The '83 was the last air cooled 430 as far as I know and it had the old reed cage.

Bigbill said:
The 390/420 has a 71mm stroke while the 430 has a 74mm stroke. That's only a 3mm difference. I believe the 420 gets close to the 430 in the bore size?
Click to expand...

The 420 is the same bore size as the 430 with 3mm less stroke.
 
Bigbill said:
I guess husqvarna pushed out what bikes they could with the parts supply they had in the early to mid 80's.
The transision to liquid engines had to be tough. Even the change to the single shock.

I still find the twin olin gas shocks the best suspension there ever was even today. There's a frame to swing arm flex I feel on the single shock bikes of today. I feel the rear tire is steering trying to pick another line when leaning. I wonder if the dirt bike designers will see and understand what this flex is doing? Someday thell wake up and say oh look what we discovered "twin shocks"???? DA??

I could go as fast as I wanted too with the twin shocks. The swing arm never bounced. The old front forks wether 38mm or 40mm worked fine. Now today there is so much adjustment in everything we need the engineer who designed it to make it right. My guru bike buddy says the dealer who sells the bike should setup the suspension. At least close for the purchaser. Every new rider thinks you just get on and ride. I get the adjust what? They don't have a clue what's race sag? What's rebound? Then it's the bikes fault when they have problems riding it. Each individual riders weight and style is different. Why are the suspension settings so fine tuned on the newer single shock bikes?
Give it just three settings? Light, medium, hard. Then change rear springs and fork oil weights to set it to the riders weight. Keep it simple? Why so high tech?
Click to expand...

Bill,

There is a big difference from the now modern machines versus the old vintage machines.
We are running faster, hitting stuff harder, and flying longer in the air/further. This is stuff I wouldn't even dream of hitting on a vintage bike at those speeds. Who would of thought that instead of ordering needles and jets, plus a lot of guessing versus hooking up your laptop and changing your air/fuel mixture in 5 minutes? Soon you will see the exact same stuff on a modern two stroke.
 
if there is anything i dislike about a certain vehicles suspension its that you cant externally adjust it. i try to get my suspension dialed in as best as possible, and im constantly learning better ways to do it. if someone is confused by having rebound and compression clickers, its not the manufacturers fault
 
I know I’m super late to this party. I just signed up to be member of this forum. I just bought 1983 500CR and the frame is Husqvarna 1 CO16340. The engine number is 0945 6813. Don’t know any history on bike.
 
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