• 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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.

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    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!

WRX400?

In Australia the 1984 Wr 400 came out as a twin shock , double leading shoe front brake , stay on the back brake with a water cooled engine and a roundish fuel tank. Later that year the same bike came out with a single shock. The 1985 model had the same components but the fuel tank looked the same as the 86. Your one looks to be the 85 , same as mine. Checking my engine number shows that mine was made 15 bikes earlier than yours so there are 2 of these in Auz that I know of. Also the compliance plate will say WR400 not WRX. My en no is 2021 0195.and yes that is the correct number for the 85 WR400.
 
They're bloody close together, could have been in the same shipment perhaps?
I think I saw another one for sale a while back, tatty but cheap, in the ad it was photographed in a ute, up your way too Mike, did you see it?
 
ajcmbrown said:
They're bloody close together, could have been in the same shipment perhaps?
I think I saw another one for sale a while back, tatty but cheap, in the ad it was photographed in a ute, up your way too Mike, did you see it?
Click to expand...
Na never saw that one.
Mine came out of the back of the local bike shop. Some fool had bought it in years earlier and said no to the work required . He was asked repeatedly to take it away but never did.
I was buying Tyres and got talking.
The owner said '' we've got one of them out the back wanna look ?''
Soon as I saw it I knew there was something funny about it.
I made them a rediculous offer and scored it.
Great bike to ride.
Thinking about that photo of one in a ute , it was probably mine on it's way home from the shop. I did put a picky up back then.
 
Sorry to hear about the case. I've had my '86 since the early 1990's and agree with your earlier statement about a prior owner tearing into it and deciding it wasn't worth the work at the time. There was a time starting around the late 1990's, and a for a few years after, that parts for this era bike were hard to come by. My old man tried to convince me to give up on getting my '86 running at more than one point, and I've gotta' say I'm glad I told him to pound sand and kept to it.
I've also got an 85.5, and appreciate the model. One time I saw a CL add for a husky and the seller noted that "some people collect these, and some people ride 'em". There's some truth to that. The buddies I ride with couldn't give a rip about me letting them ride the '85.5 vs. the '86 (aside from the front brake). As someone with a touch of the collecting bug, I do appreciate the difference.
 
Wise words ETL!

I'll persevere with this one, as much as I love my 88 250 and 88 400, this one is the rarest single shock bike apart from a 435.
 
This is getting stranger, it seems from this document at least, that there were three 400 models in 1985, a twinshock 400WR, a single shock short suspension WR, and a 400WRX that had XC suspension, since mine has the XC suspension I assumed it was a WRX, but maybe I'm incorrect?

I really want to correctly identify which model I have, so I guess the question is, since mine has XC suspension which certainly appears original, what does that make it? Some are saying it isn't a WRX, but then it can't be a WR either??

Maybe some sort of mongrel made up of leftover parts before the 86 model appeared? Or an Australia specific model? Special order?

https://www.husqvarnavintage.com/storepage1586062.aspx

1985 400WR Frame from WO-21100 & WP-05000 Engine number prefix from 0981 & 2021
1985 400WRX Frame from WP-05000 Engine number prefix from 2021

The frame/engine numbers are the same for WRX and WR too.
My frame number is WP05281 and the engine number is 2021-0210.

does anyone have a pic of the build plate of their WRX?

Tony.
 
Hello

Hello

hello... lol






Call it what you think it is, can anyone disprove it if you cant prove it?
Small amount of bikes were built but no productions numbers of each model :(, if only we could find records or more real info from the VIN.

Easy to do with an old car and find out how many were made.

Like the 82 500 CR is it 500 or 534 lol WTF? :banghead:

Many rare bikes were made, or lack of bikes made.
How many 87 or 88 autos?
How many 87 CR 500. barley any around.

All that matters its a 85 WR with long legs and that says _ _ _


 
2premo said:
so I'm prepared to ask the stupid question
from those 2 pics how can you determine its an 85.5 WRX
on the 85 they used a stay for the brake backing plate on the 86 it was a slot that fitted a tab like the 87-88, what is the 85.5?
I was unaware of a mid year on that model

on the expansion chamber don't use an 87-88 as the stroke is different
on the silencer, pretty sure the 85-86 were different enough from the 87-88 that the power robbing might not be an issue
the secret to coolant is to get premix to prevent minerals in the water side of the mix

that is a project for sure, but will be nice once you kick it back to life
Click to expand...

The WRX has the stay arm for the rear brake. The slot and tab appeared on the 86 Enduro models
 
ill think you will find with husky that in periods of intense development ie the single shock frame release, lots of small production changes would occur over short model no runs. im pretty sure they intended to launch the l/c engines in the single shock frame with disk brakes but it just didnt pan out. the motors were ready before the frames and the brakes wernt ready so a series of bikes came out over around a 12 month period that were a blend of all their new and old bits. additionally, dealers having just sold an 85 wrx might easily for the right customer upgrade the front end 6 months later with a disk..especially if they were sponsoring riders. ktms have this issue in some models.
 
This bike is about to enter it's first Vinduro this coming weekend, there are some minor details to attend to but it looks and feels great.
Being winter here, daylight hours are hard to come by due to work, but I'm hoping this bike is as good as I'd imagined.
More pics to follow....
 
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