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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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

Real world compression numbers?

1 Wheel Drive

1 Wheel Drive

Husqvarna
New to me 1988 250 XC starts and runs ok. No apparent lack of power. Measured compression while spinning the crank with a power drill and got only 40 psi. Cold and dry. Shot some oil in and compression improved to 60 psi. Still way less than I would expect. It may be that my old compression gauge is whacko, which I need to figure a way to test, or maybe my ring is toast.

So, with a good gauge, what kind of psi numbers are people seeing normally?
 
If the bike has been sitting for some time or stored away most likely the ring is just stuck in the piston ring land from dried up carbon or oil. I can't say what is a good compression reading is for that model of Husky but yes it should be considerably more than 40-60psi.

Marty
 
Don't have any experience working on the 80's stuff but I can say for certain that a fresh rebuilt early 70's 450 runs 130 psi when turning it over with the kicker.
 
Thanks guys. That was my hunch too. I’ll double check it since the readings were before I got it running and if it hasn’t improved greatly, and my gauge is believable, I’ll look into the top end. Maybe just a disassembly, clean-up of the ring groove, check for excess wear, and reassembly will get me back in business.
 
If it runs... compression is not likely to be a true 40-60psi. Doubt you could get it started with that little compression. And it would feel very soft at the kick lever.

On the other hand, It could have been stuck and/or rusty in there, and once running it has cleaned itself out to some degree. That's obviously not the 'best' way to rebuild a top end! But I've seen it.
 
Try pushing it down the street in second gear for about 50 feet with the gauge attached to get a better number
 
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