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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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

Skid Plate Options

Motosportz said:
The holes in the bottom of my plate allow mud to escape (not trapping pounds of mud and leaves) which also helps cooling and also reduce weight.

Our plate is twice as thick and welded brackets. This makes it insainly strong which is what that oil line needs. It is a frame connector / skid plate. The rear mounts are CNC machined billet. Our entire plate is CNC billet no sheet metal and much more expensive to build than sheet metal (Yet our plate is still $100 plus less).
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Agreed.
 
I can attest to those holes being quite helpful for NOT collecting mud and bits in. It is very easy to clean too.
The wings will help make this thing perfecto.
 
Motosportz said:
I make the Motosportz plate so take my response with a grain of salt.
Yet our plate is still $100 plus less
Click to expand...

International shipping costs and exchange rates play a big part here. For us in Australia, the cost of a shipped locally produced B&B plate would be about $100 cheaper than shipping in the Motosportz version. Wind the clock back a few years to when the exchange rates were much more favourable to US importers, and the Australian plate probably would have shipped to the US for $100 less than your locally produced product, and that's without changing any materials or manufacturing processes. Fortunately for us Australians, the $US and $AU being at parity means there are lots of US manufactured farkles which a few years back would have been prohibitively expensive which are now very affordable.
 
Motosportz said:
I make the Motosportz plate so take my response with a grain of salt.

The holes in the bottom of my plate allow mud to escape (not trapping pounds of mud and leaves) which also helps cooling and also reduce weight. Our plate is twice as thick and welded brackets. This makes it insainly strong which is what that oil line needs. It is a frame connector / skid plate. The rear mounts are CNC machined billet. Our entire plate is CNC billet no sheet metal and much more expensive to build than sheet metal (Yet our plate is still $100 plus less). The other plate shown has a flat sheet metal area between the side wings and rear bracket, this IMHO will not hold up to landing on a rock and will bend up. This was my fear when designing ours and the reason i went through the trouble of building a super stout but low profile plate that is not simple sheet metal. You hit that oil line and your motor is toast. The B&B plate looks nice, not bashing it at all just making observations. thanks
Click to expand...

Very little mud gets trapped under the B&B as a layer of foam is fitted between it and the engine to keep it out and reduce vibration. It will handle a hard hit on a rock or anything else without fuss - I've done it several times over 20,000+kms of off road riding over the last three years - it's bloody tough.

They are long established and highly regarded here in Aus and their products are used by elite racers. I'm not suggesting they are better than the one from Motosportz, but in the interests of fairness they are top notch.

They also offer other products for the 650 - see http://www.bboffroad.com.au/tr_650_terra.htm
 
Motosportz said:
I make the Motosportz plate so take my response with a grain of salt.

The holes in the bottom of my plate allow mud to escape (not trapping pounds of mud and leaves) which also helps cooling and also reduce weight. Our plate is twice as thick and welded brackets. This makes it insainly strong which is what that oil line needs. It is a frame connector / skid plate. The rear mounts are CNC machined billet. Our entire plate is CNC billet no sheet metal and much more expensive to build than sheet metal (Yet our plate is still $100 plus less). The other plate shown has a flat sheet metal area between the side wings and rear bracket, this IMHO will not hold up to landing on a rock and will bend up. This was my fear when designing ours and the reason i went through the trouble of building a super stout but low profile plate that is not simple sheet metal. You hit that oil line and your motor is toast. The B&B plate looks nice, not bashing it at all just making observations. thanks

IMG_2804-L.jpg


IMG_2832-L.jpg


IMG_2766-L.jpg
Click to expand...
There you go, I was beginning to think everyone forgot that there is no frame under the engine, the engine acts as the frame...
 
Another resource coming:

Just dropped off my Terra to Ricochet here in Salt Lake for them to prototype a Skidplate for the 650! Looking forward to seeing their solution for all the exposed lines --

http://utahsportcycle.com/index.html

Full disclosure: for giving up my baby for a week, I will get a "smoking' deal" on the prototype.

Paul
 
Dont forget that the holes also help dissipate engine noise. I have a BB on my 310. I took to it with a drill abd put in about 50 holes-makes a real difference in the engine resonance department. Like Motorspot plate looks very well engineered.
 
go to the Touratech web site, USA, and click on Terra. The Touratech has no holes in the bottom, 3 button head cap screws into the mounts. I like this so you can get all the crap out of the pan that builds up. Also the pan is corrugated to stiffen it up. Cleaver design for light-medium duty trails and leaves room to add crash bars.
 
images


Here is the Touratech plate...tried to load the pic the conventional way but wouldn't work for me either.



Not the best pic of them but i think im gona go with their handguards as well
 
I had to grind some off of the rear mount on the right side arm and add a washer on top of the spacer to get to clear the case not a big deal....the washer would probably have done it, fits nice. Comes up far enough in the front to help out and leaves room for crash bars I will be adding to protect radiator and the lines on the front sides of the engine.
 
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