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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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

Stray 1981 430 XC Adopted

steve1970

steve1970

Husqvarna
A Class
This bike sort of fell into my lap recently (as money left my wallet). Found it through a friend. I definitely didn't need another project but the price was right and the bike is pretty complete. A quick inspection revealed a few things.

- Front end was badly misaligned but the fork stanchions looked straight. Front wheel was pointed about 15 degrees to the right. The bars were also visibly misaligned with the fork caps as a visual reference, bar clamps were crooked in the triple clamps.
- Tank had a good layer of high quality aged desert lacquer in the bottom.
- Carb gummed up (not surprised)
-Had oil in it, didn't smell like gas and no sign of water or moisture (surprised)

Spent a little time this week at night cleaning a few things and checking it out. Has compression but seems low at 110psi. Has spark. Carb cleaned up nicely after a soak. Tank was not as bad as I thought, I poured some carb dip in there and shook it around and it cleaned right up after 15 minutes or so. Rinsed it out real well since the carb dip isn't good for aluminum long term.

I loosened the entire front end up and pulled the bars off. Did my best to align things and retightened. The front wheel was now pretty straight. The grommets in the top triple clamp that isolate the bar clamps were pretty rotten and crushed in a way that indicated a hit to the bars. Then found a circular weld that had been ground down on the left side of the bars just inside the brake lever but before the crossbar joint. Who knows. Maybe the bike went down hard and someone quit midway through sorting it out.

Not sure where I'll go with this bike yet. My 430 CR project needs my spare time so guessing I'll just do easy stuff on this one as time allows and decide down the road where to go with it.
 

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Spent a little time this week at night cleaning a few things and checking it out. Has compression but seems low at 110psi. Has spark. Carb cleaned up nicely after a soak. Tank was not as bad as I thought, I poured some carb dip in there and shook it around and it cleaned right up after 15 minutes or so. Rinsed it out real well since the carb dip isn't good for aluminum long term.
Click to expand...
So after all this did you try to start it?
 
Tank looks great inside but that right side looks like tinfoil thats been crumpled and then attempted to be smooth it out. Based on the other parts you found misaligned and the welded bars it looks like someone who road it wasn't afraid of crashing.

Sure is a good looking husky though.
 
Crashaholic said:
Tank looks great inside but that right side looks like tinfoil thats been crumpled and then attempted to be smooth it out. Based on the other parts you found misaligned and the welded bars it looks like someone who road it wasn't afraid of crashing.

Sure is a good looking husky though.
Click to expand...
I think you're right, the side of the tank looks like a repair attempt. It's funny, certain parts of the bike look to be in great shape but others have been through a hard life. Not sure if I'll try to start it at this time, if I decide to I need to order a carb kit and an intake manifold. Carb is clean but all seals/gasket shot. Manifold is crumbly and dry.
 
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