robertaccio
Husqvarna
Pro Class
Trail Rider is way more "real" world/core than the the big SoCal based mags.
I feel the need to renew/support, it's been a while.
I feel the need to renew/support, it's been a while.
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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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!
I feel the need to renew/support, it's been a while.
Kelly re-read the test and you'll see that they talk about how the stock bike performs, in the first part of the article..... They did ride it stock. Then they talk about the well established mods for KTM products.Geeze they changed the jetting, head, powervalve, revalved the suspension, changed tires... etc. While it is nice to know what works it would be also nice to know how it was stock. Sounds like a good bike for sure, just like the much loved KTM 250/300.
Notice the mag article talks about the advertised weight being 230 lbs. The only place I've seen that is other mag articles, the manual states the weight is 234.6 lbs w/o fuel.
I'm gonna say something kind of weird...but what the heck. I think this bike feels a LOT like my souped-up KDX220 originally manufactured back in 2001. I've upgraded the suspension with well-sorted KYB usd's and such, and the handling is similar, as is the engine power curve (of course the 250 has more HP, but not that much). Believe it or not, the KDX puts out a little more torque at low rpms...but I've only got about an hour on the TE, so that might improve.
Something else...my TE250 after a nice long painful ride in stutter-bump wonderland yesterday, now has a seat height of just slightly over 37 inches. That's not bad, and is only about 1/2 inch over my KDX seat height. I'm thinking that is quite a bit lower than the PDS equipped bikes, and is really a plus for tight nasty single-track stuff, especially for old sore guys like me. Electric start is cool too.
I'm still fiddling with the suspension settings, but the bike seems right on for rugged tight trail work. It is a quick turning bike for sure. I just wish california let me ride it all year... red sticker means four months mid-year I can't ride. Eh, that's why I'll never get ride of my KDX's.
Oh, I'm gonna bitch about one thing...why are these bikes, and the KTM enduro models, sold without a spark arrestor? Virtually every riding place requires them, at least out west, and the Jap brands all sell theirs' with the units. So the price goes up $140 or so, and a bit of our earth's resources are wasted. Doesn't make sense to me.
I think they list some wierd deminsions for the Huskys. I went with a PDS Berg because it felt much lower when I sat on both at the dealer. If you compare a link equipped XC vs. the PDS XCW on KTM's sight the PDS chassis is over an inch shorter, is lighter, and has less ground clearance. The Berg basically mirrors the XCW it's based on, but strangely, the Husky only inherited the link and weight of the XC chassis it's based on, keeping the same height and clearance as the PDS XCW and Berg. I know it has the plastic sub frame, but that shouldn't change the ground clearance.
I like PDS bikes when they're set up right, and you can put in an x-bushing to lower it almost 1 more inch without the ill effects you get from lowering links.
I agree with you on the missing spark arrestor and the similarity to a nicely set up KDX. I got a flat on the TE300 on Saturday and rode the KDX on Sunday and it is almost as fun, quite a bit slower in the open but can hold it's own in the tight stuff.