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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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

SWM 650 Adv

I don't know....swapping one shonky/wonky manufacturer for another one doesn't make much sense to me.
I don't trust the Chinese to build a fully-fledged motorcycle of any kind...yet!
XT660R's are going for end-of-line-prices in Oz at the moment...that'd be my port of call instead.
 
glitch_oz said:
I don't trust the Chinese to build a fully-fledged motorcycle of any kind...yet!
XT660R's are going for end-of-line-prices in Oz at the moment...that'd be my port of call instead.
Click to expand...

It's not chinese build. It's italian, parts from the Husky 630, but chinese ownership.
 
thats what it is, basically the 630s were so expensive they didnt sell enough so the model wasnt viable, now they can be made for less money but same bike nearly and the kool aftermarket stuff still fits
 
I suspect these will be pretty cheap in a year or two--no way they will hold value. At $9,000 a KTM or Africa Twin (for bit more) look pretty good. TR is still the best bang for the buck in dual sport/small adv bikes IMHO.
 
Next said:
I suspect these will be pretty cheap in a year or two--no way they will hold value. At $9,000 a KTM or Africa Twin (for bit more) look pretty good. TR is still the best bang for the buck in dual sport/small adv bikes IMHO.
Click to expand...
 
glitch_oz said:
I don't trust the Chinese to build a fully-fledged motorcycle of any kind...yet!
Click to expand...

I'm not sold that Italians put them together any better. :)

In any case, I really like all of the SWM offerings. Hopefully their US distributor will get serious with it. They are some great looking bikes.
 
gullywasher said:
I'm not sold that Italians put them together any better. :)

In any case, I really like all of the SWM offerings. Hopefully their US distributor will get serious with it. They are some great looking bikes.
Click to expand...

Who is the US distributer? I looked and only found Oz dealers of the SWM. I contacted SWM via webform and have not heard back yet.
 
The thing I really like is their oldish tech in fact Id be quite happy if they were carbureted after all the problems with the Terra fueling.
 
mag00 said:
Who is the US distributer? I looked and only found Oz dealers of the SWM. I contacted SWM via webform and have not heard back yet.
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Motoman Distributing out of Oak Hills, CA was who they enlisted a year or so ago when SWM was brought back to life. I assume they still have the contract, but I guess that doesn't bode well if you couldn't find them on SWM's website.
 
gullywasher said:
Motoman Distributing out of Oak Hills, CA was who they enlisted a year or so ago when SWM was brought back to life. I assume they still have the contract, but I guess that doesn't bode well if you couldn't find them on SWM's website.
Click to expand...

Well, I have slow internet and many websites will not load. I could not get the main SWM site to load and tried from the Oz site. I looked them up and called a couple different numbers, no luck so far.
 
gullywasher said:
I'm not sold that Italians put them together any better. :)
Click to expand...

I have seen the 650 in the flesh and the build quality is impressive. The overall finish and welding on the subframe is incredible, Japanese don't even come close let-a-lone Chinese.

The factory employees the former BMW/Husky staff that built our bikes but they have taken it to another level!. I just wish they had employed a graphic artist, that yellow is just puk.
 
Guys I have had my SWM 650R for a year now and it is a quality product. It is not Chinese built. I have taken it on several 2 and 3 day tours and weekly rides with mates mid week. It is excellent off road and handles well on road. It will sit on 120 kms all day quite readily. I believe the smaller 400 road/scrambler bikes are Italian build with Chinese engines. The 310 and 510 are all Italian as well.
 
Husky dealer who fixed up my wonky recall said that the 630 / 610 motor was only good for 15 to 20k back in the day. Was he pulling my leg?
 
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