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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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

plastic restoring tips??

I did a Yamaha gas tank similar to the way "can" did it. I used a heat gun instead of the torch though, and used some polish on it. It looked pretty good from about 5 paces for about a week and a half, then the whole side of the gas tank split open. I am gonna guess the heat made it brittle.
 
can said:
A couple days ago I did a 5 minute "restoration" on a preston petty canam front fender with a turbotorch after trying a heat gun with no success. The fender was severely oxidized, I should have used steel wool to remove the oxidation first but just jumped in with the torch. finished results,, went from looking terrible to "not bad at 5 paces", looks shiny but definetely not perfect. This may not work on all plastic though.
Click to expand...

I hope a plastics expert steps in here and explains the various plastic compounds.
Preston Petty plastic? I wonder how it compares to the modern plastic ans some of the differences.
 
Chayzed Pilot said:
I did a Yamaha gas tank similar to the way "can" did it. I used a heat gun instead of the torch though, and used some polish on it. It looked pretty good from about 5 paces for about a week and a half, then the whole side of the gas tank split open. I am gonna guess the heat made it brittle.
Click to expand...

I have never heard of doing it to a gas tank (I thought about it too) and now I see why.
:(
 
I know this is an old thread, but it is still relevant, the plastic used on Husqvarnas must be a higher quality or different material than the Japanese manufacturers, I've done Jap plastics before and they aren't too bad, but as mentioned earlier, the Husky plastics delaminate in layers and it seems to be a much harder plastic. I have found that 320 wet and dry is as coarse as you need to go with japanese plastics, but I had to go down to 180 grit paper and rub the bejeesus out of it for hours just to get a base to start from.
On one radiator shroud I had to resort to a razor blade to get a thick layer of oxidised, delaminating plastic off, the 180 W/D paper wouldn't touch it.
Tony Brown.
 
The Husky plastic is different from the Japanese. Most Acerbris stuff was a nylon resin polymer. Not the same as the polyurethane type plastic on Japanese bikes. You can see very very tiny "pore" looing things in the Husky stuff. on first cleanup they show looking like thousands of little blackhead pimples on a teenagers face!
 
Another thing I've used on previous paint stuff, that I wanted to strip of the old crappy paint is Castrol Super Clean.

Buy it in the gallon size jug, put part in a suitable container, & submerge what you want to strip paint off of.
Let it sit overnight & unless it's really bad ,the old paint will fall right off.

Don't let you parts sit for more then a few days thought as it will dis color the plastic , it really strong stuff :eek: .

And the best thing is it's reusable, pour the stuff back into the container, all but the paint that floats to the bottom,
that you toss..

and one last thing , don't let your hand , stay in the stuff for too long, they don't call in Super Clean for nothing,
it will do a job on cuts on your hands...
 
So I have tried all the different ways. Be warned, to do it correctly it is a ton of work and takes practice, but it can be done. Honestly, I don't think most will have the patience to sand properly. Here is some jap plastic I did. The gray areas had to be scraped then then wet sanded with progressive grits, carefully washing all the prior grit away before starting on the next grit. Final stage is a large soft buffing wheel with blue compound, but you just BARELY touch the wheel, kind of float if over the plastic so as not to create heat. First pic is after some scraping.




Final Product
 
I start with a Case Trapper pocket knife it seems to be the best thing for me . Hold it straight down like your cutting a carrot or something on a cutting board , then just rake it in one direction . You've been warned this takes some serious time and tons of elbow grease and quite a few adult beverages .
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top