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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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!
So with the 15mm offset, lets say if you stayed with the same wheel/tire suspension combo. Just lower offset triples which will change the trail. Generally this would shorten the wheel base and change a ton of geometry, would it make it turn in easier/faster make the bike more nimble? OR do they do this on the smr to make it more STABLE after the 17's and shorter forks?I know its hard to say but a broad generalization will work.
In my experience, projects like this can get expensive. Wheels, rotors, sprockets, adapter and tires/tubes will be $1500 alone, and you'll still have the TE caliper. I know that from first hand experience. Add to that what is essentially a complete new front-end and you're going to be at ~$3500. Assuming the TE is worth $5K, you'll have $8,500 in the conversion. You can get a lot of SM for that many $$.
You should considering just selling the TE and buying a plug-n-play SM. I see the SM bikes on craigslist all the time in the bay area. Lots of these things out the with very low miles and the asking price is usually in the $5,000 range. You'd be hard pressed to convert a TE and have much left of $5K.