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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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

MJ & MK frames

Picklito

Picklito

Husqvarna
Pro Class
Anybody know what was changed with the move from MJ to MK frames?

I'm scratch-building a CR 400, 72-74 era, and want to know if there are enough improvements in the later MK that make it worth searching for. Already have a good 2025 5-speed CR engine and lots of other parts, but need to select a frame. There seems to be lots more MJ available than MK.

Pictures of the "improvements" or comparisons of course would be greatly appreciated! Thanks.
 
If you have not seen this already then it may be of interest:

http://www.vintagehusky.com/framemods.htm

My understanding is that the only real frame mods on Mk/MJ frames is to tighten the head angle (new tripples) and to lengthen the rear swing arm to a 74 or later arm.

Post 73' forks improve matters (black leg) - better still spindles and valves from 74' on are of help to damping. (See Husky club news letter pdf for all fork matters in archive section here on CH - Edition#38?)

I spent a lot of time thinking about improvements I could make during my restoration; frame mods, suspension, reed valves, Etc Etc.... I essentially didnt do any so the bike is basically stock. Having now ridden the bike I am soooo impressed by the bikes poise and refinement, neither of which I was expecting, I thought it would be a bit agricultural and rough around the edges - show its age... not so, Sharp and lithe, spectacular power. Its race heritage comes through in spades. I owe a lot of this I believe to everything being set up right. Tight and together versus sloppy and knackered.

Anyway thats my two cents ....

lastly - my front brake is pretty useless... (I started to look into double cam early 80's hubs to lace into my ribbed Akront)
 
Thanks retro rocket. Have been following your thread and build. You did such a good job that it's not a surprise how nicely your bike runs. I've also scoured the internet and did read about Vintage Husky's frame mod. Looks like a good idea.

First, though, I'm more looking for the differences between a stock MJ frame and a stock MK frame. Know anything about that?
 
The MK frame has a out board support of the swinging arm. Other tham that I think they are the same. Are you sure about that 2025 ID #.
 
Thanks auto. The "parts roach" was a 72 with ML frame and 2025 engine. When I looked it up those numbers matched 72 400 CR. Does that not sound right?
 
auto said:
The MK frame has a out board support of the swinging arm. Other tham that I think they are the same.
Click to expand...

auto, thanks. I've been working on the 72 and 73 frames side by side, and it appears this is about it. Not sure if there were any subtle geometry changes, but everything else is pretty much a direct cross over. The 72 and 73 do have slightly different bearing cups in the frame, but they are swappable. But I was not able to directly put the 72 triples on the 73 frame without doing that. I came across a set of actual 73 triples so I just kept 72 with 72 and 73 with 73.
 
You should be able to swap the bearing races on the triples.You can use the larger bearing setup then.
 
I found a good 73 MK to build. It has the original small bearing races in the triples. What was confusing me, is that my modified 72 frame had what turned out to be swapped-in later model large bearing races. I will be running those in the 73, along with whatever-the-heck this Mag-ish swing arm is! Here's a partial mock-up. 73 MK in front with the modded 72 MJ behind it:

IMG_1775_2.jpg

You can (almost) see the difference in the bearing races in this shot:

IMG_1776.jpg
 
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