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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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

1976 360CR GP project

ruwfo

ruwfo

Administrator
Staff member
Ok after getting a bunch of my 360 questions answered last week , I fell into a 79 390WR which was pretty hammer, but the price was right, FREE. The plan was to see how similar a 360 & 390 motor where, as already had a75 360GP frame & now a 79 390 motor. Could I make a early GP replica, out the parts I have?

The 390’s motor was already out , as it had a made a crunching noise?, so I messed around with mounting it in the 75 frame on Friday. Here’s what I found, the 390 fits ,but has slightly different cases in the front motor mount area vs the 360. The 390 uses 4 motor mount bolts in front , the 360 uses 3 bolts or a single engine bolt lug vs 2. The rear mounts line up, as long as you use the earlier rear swingarm motor plates, & the banana swingarm I had, bolted right on. As I wasn’t too keen on using the 360 front engine plates & leaving 1 motor mount without a bolt, so I stopped.

Rather then butcher up a set of 390 front mounting plates, I made a last minute decision & bought a 76 360CR I had earlier in the week, made an offer on , over the phone.

Actually it worked out much better then I 1st thought, as on Sunday I noticed the 75 frame was repaired once & the job didn’t look to swift. Also I pull the top end of the 390 & low and behold the piston broke on the intake side, and as bad luck would have it, the pieces jammed in the front side of the rod & broke the cases. And I mean really broke them, there was gear oil in the crank journal area.. So much for using parts i already had:banghead:

As with most projects, very little goes by cheaply, now’s when I’m glad I bought the bullet & sprung for a 76 360 which had low compression , but was surprisingly all original. So starts another Vintage restoration project, to build a mid 70’s works style GP bike.

The plan is to take a stock 360, install a banana style Swingarm, install long rear shocks, take the triples off a 77 or 78 125CR & install either 79 CR or WR front end, to balance out the added shock length. Of course while I’m at it, it will get a new top, & most of the bike will get prettied up.

Sound simple right??
Husky John
 
Sounds like you have your hands full now:)

Of course I am piddling trying to get a right radiator on the 400WRX. The one from the bike has a nice banana curve to it and the right rad from the 400WR has a number of squashed fins impeding air flow, So I am trying to gently reform the fins with my favorite gerber knife and an Xacto knfe to try to straighten out the fins. I figure when I finish the 400WR it will get new rads and hoses
 
This bike had been kicking around PA, for a couple years now, I’ve seen it on Ebay & of course craigslist. I remember think I should have bid on it when it was on Ebay, but never did. Anyway the Guy I got it from was the winning bidder, but it sat for probably a year before it started to pop up off & on craigslist for probably 6 months. Time was on my side & I got it for ½ of his original asking price & he said he sold at a slight loss.

The bike ,though a number matching CR was ridden as a woods bike, bar busters, bash plate & the like. What I find cool is the old school garage mechanic up grades. The bash plate looks home made, but someone thought enough to cut a slot in it , to drain the oil with it on. Also check out the cut off screws welded on the foot pegs & the brake pedal bolts that keep your foot from coming off. Not the prettiest modification but they sure do work. Bike has Preston Petty side number plates & a “Flying Finn” embossed red mud flap, along with a top of a spackle buckle front plate (I kid you not).

Here's what it looked like off the truck... homemade bash plate, foot peg & brake lever , too wide original bars ..

more to come... Husky John
 

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That era 360 is a REALLY nice bike. I like your build plan, too. If you aim for about 9" at each end it should be very well-balanced. The 35mm fork works well at that length without getting TOO flexy, especially if you swap in a later model 35 fork with longer tubes, but use a 9" damper rod inside to get a little more overlap. Sounds like you could do something like that with a mix of 76 and 79 parts??? Does your 79 have the remote reservoir Ohlins on it??? If so...
 
Picklito said:
That era 360 is a REALLY nice bike. I like your build plan, too. If you aim for about 9" at each end it should be very well-balanced. The 35mm fork works well at that length without getting TOO flexy, especially if you swap in a later model 35 fork with longer tubes, but use a 9" damper rod inside to get a little more overlap. Sounds like you could do something like that with a mix of 76 and 79 parts??? Does your 79 have the remote reservoir Ohlins on it??? If so...
Click to expand...
Yeap that's the plan use as many 79 parts as i can. Here's a few pics of the banana swingarm on the 75 360 frame, one without any shocks & one with a 15"c-c Ohlins from
the 79.
 

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You may have seen this before but the pictures have been removed or lost from Siege's website. The 77 250CR and the 77 360WR both seem to have been built on 1976 frames. So this is something where you can see what Lyndell did with the bikes and his and Siege's impressions of the bikes
 

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Well, fiddled with the old girl today, got her running, had to jump start it, but hey she got low compression, so i was surprised she fired up.

Time to play around with the swingarms & different shock lengths.

1) Pull off the stock length? 13" shocks, & put on 15", but i think there too long as it really jacked up the rear end.

2) Then i tried a banana style swingarm, with those 15" shocks, but this change required using a later model wheel as the swingarm is wider. A 79 wheel
fit fine, but i'm still not sure the 15" length is right still. Also it looks like i have to get another brake hub, as the 76 wouldn't work properly.

Still not sure which direction, yet til i put some different longer fork on..
 

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jimspac said:
You may have seen this before but the pictures have been removed or lost from Siege's website. The 77 250CR and the 77 360WR both seem to have been built on 1976 frames. So this is something where you can see what Lyndell did with the bikes and his and Siege's impressions of the bikes
Click to expand...

I'm really surprised they said the 77's handle so well, jacked up so high like it is ....
 
You might want to try a shock lay out that Howerton used back in the day.Rear mounts moved back.If your going up to Snoops ride I have one.I'm looking for a good set of 360 cases
 
ruwfo said:
I'm really surprised they said the 77's handle so well, jacked up so high like it is ....
Click to expand...
The Curnutts they were running had either 14.5 or 16" eye to eye length. That pushes up the rear enough to reduce the rake and trail to the 1977CR specs or even sharper. Just by the way the rear shock mounts on those 2 pointed down that is what told me both were built on the 1976 spec frames. Both the CR & WR in 1976 used the same 32° rake frame and the 1977 WR models used them up while the CR got the frame with 29° rake.

Depending on the shock drop in your banana swingarm you might want to try 14". One thing I use to determine shock length desired when I am customizing is turnbuckles. I have two sets. I have a shorter set that goes from 8 to 13" and a longer set that goes up to almost 20" with an extended eye bolt. You just set it in place with the shock bolt and adjust until you get the ride height you want, Then measure the distance between the centers of the shock bolts( not center of turnbuckle eyes). The number will be the shock length you want. Simple and cheap
 
jimspac said:
The Curnutts they were running had either 14.5 or 16" eye to eye length. That pushes up the rear enough to reduce the rake and trail to the 1977CR specs or even sharper. Just by the way the rear shock mounts on those 2 pointed down that is what told me both were built on the 1976 spec frames. Both the CR & WR in 1976 used the same 32° rake frame and the 1977 WR models used them up while the CR got the frame with 29° rake.

Depending on the shock drop in your banana swingarm you might want to try 14". One thing I use to determine shock length desired when I am customizing is turnbuckles. I have two sets. I have a shorter set that goes from 8 to 13" and a longer set that goes up to almost 20" with an extended eye bolt. You just set it in place with the shock bolt and adjust until you get the ride height you want, Then measure the distance between the centers of the shock bolts( not center of turnbuckle eyes). The number will be the shock length you want. Simple and cheap
Click to expand...

JIm,
14" length is what i was thinking as well, my 15" Ohlins, i was told can be shorten easily. The adjustable turnbuckle is a great idea, the biggest thing is to
NOT have a crazy angle on the swingarm, so the chain just digs into it.
Husky John
 
auto said:
You might want to try a shock lay out that Howerton used back in the day.Rear mounts moved back.If your going up to Snoops ride I have one.I'm looking for a good set of 360 cases
Click to expand...

I'll be at Snoops
 
ruwfo said:
JIm,
14" length is what i was think as well, my 15" Ohlins, i was told can be shorten easily. The adjustable turnbuckle is a great idea, the biggest thing is to
NOT have a crazy angle on the swingarm, so the chain just dig into it.
Husky John
Click to expand...
Another key to building a great handling bike is to have swingarm angle at rest, no load on bike at 17° from horizontal. Any angle greater than that is decreasing benefit
 
Here's a couple of tidbits for you guys. The replacement Curnutt for the 76 GP's was 13 3/4" shock. I owned Charlie Jr's 76 race bike back in those days after he quit racing. It was running the banana swing arm that he made and was using a 15 3/4" shock. It also had some fork work done and the bike was balanced well. It was used for desert racing. I don't remember if he moved the bottom mount to compensate but it was a great bike for the desert. I worked for the Curnutts back then and did shop work and also tested bikes.
 
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