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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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

1979 CR390 Hard Starting

Ron

Ron

Husqvarna
AA Class
I built this bike for my son about 2 years ago and he loves it, but it has always been difficult to start.
My 30 yr. old son is the only one that has ever been able to start it. His leg is strong enough to kick a 390 like a jack rabbit and can usually get it started.
I've been all over the map with retarding the timing, pilot jets and slide cutaways, but never found a solution.
The bike has been sitting since about last October and we decided to go out riding this week.
On the previous weekend we thought we should give it a quick once over and fire it up.
We drained the tank and put some fresh gas in it, but after kicking our brains out we only got a pop on about the 3rd kick.
I decided to pull the plug and make sure it was getting spark. Holding the plug against the head with my son kicking, there was spark, but a little weak and intermittent. I have always suspected the Motoplat is getting weak from the beginning, but it would run.
Not sure why, but I decided to change the plug cap.
I cut about 3/8" off the end of the plug wire and installed a new cap.
Put in a new plug and the damn thing started on the 2nd kick. It was pretty loaded up but cleared out quickly.
When we went riding it started on the 3rd kick stone cold and then started on the first kick all day, after it was warm.
Another hard lesson learned.

 
First off gorgeous bike! Second I have been there done that many times. In fact had this same issue a few days ago with a non husky bike. Third my new to me 83 XC500 is EZ to start which was shocking to me. Forth are you looking to adopt anyone as I could love a bike like that :D
 
my street bike did this to me as well...and this thing has zero rust anywhere, i actually question how many times its even been wet in its life..but the plug wires were all burnt up going into the 4 coils, probably from resistance...cut quarter inch off and it ran nicely..
 
Nice ride. I have one just like it. Black tank with gold trim is sexy to say the least. It is unarguably the most beautiful dirt bike ever made.
Huskys are on average not easy to start. The mag can also be the reason for hard starting. If the magnatism is not strong enough, you will not generate a stong enough spark for the bike to start. Easy to test if you have another mag to compare.
Just a note: When I ride my bike cold, I turn on gas, set choke, then slowly kick through until I feel it kick back, then with gusto I kick and it usually fires up.
 
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