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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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

1985 XC 500 set up tips

Dave Mills

Dave Mills

Husqvarna
AA Class
I just purchased a 85 XC500 on Sunday, this is my 1st Husky and was wondering, do they all vibrate badly? I there anything I can do to quell some of the vibration? I also wanted to know what is good cranking cylinder psi, The bike seems easy to kick thru the stroke. It pulls like a train in the midrange but burbles down low and vibrates up top. Any help with porting/pipe and chassis set up would be appreciated
 
The first thing I would do is remove the swingarm and inspect all the bearings in it and the linkage. Inspect the holes the swingarm pivot goes in and the swingarm pivot bolt. In order to fully inspect the rear of the engine where the steel inserts go you really have to remove the engine but if there is looseness in those inserts or cracking around them you might be able to tell in place. There has been some talk about adding another motor mount but nothing with pictures and description at least since I have been paying attention.

My opinion is that the transfer area in the case is very small for that displacement and a pipe more like other big bore bikes with more length is the best approch. Apparently some have been ported but I havn't examined what they did. Well a lot of used cylinders have been tampered with in the transfer area which must activate through the holes in the piston but I don't think that would help a lot.

Fran
 
Thanks for the input Fran. Is there a way to adapt rubber engine mounts or rubber bar mounts to calm the vibration?
 
Dave Mills said:
Thanks for the input Fran. Is there a way to adapt rubber engine mounts or rubber bar mounts to calm the vibration?
Click to expand...
Dave, I've heard many people say that filling the handle bars with silicon rubber can help dampen the vibes felt as it dampens them. Haven't had to do this myself on my '83 XC500. The vibration seems to vary from bike to bike. Mine isn't so bad, but I have newer handlebars.

Cheers
Lucien.
 
I haven't yet. Maybe this weekend I'll get to it. I will probably do a compression test. The paper work that I received with the bike shows receipt for a bore and 1st over piston. I don't think the bike has that much time on the new bore.
 
MAKE SURE ALL MOTOR MOUNTS ARE TIGHT AND NOT BROKE, CHECK EXPAINSION CHAMBER MOU NT. YES THEY ALL VIBRERAITE! I FILLED MY BARS WITH 3M FLEXABLE FOAM HELPS ALOT! GOTA KEEP UP ON MOUNTS, MAYBE INSTALL NYLON WASHERS IN LOWER MOUNT.
 
Thanks for the input Lucien. I will be purchasing some new renthals, as the bars on it are bent a bit. I'll shoot some silicone in them and see how that works.
 
Thanks Leadvillehusky. I'll check motor mounts too. When I grab a handfull of throttle it makes my vision blur. Not from acceleration, but from vibration!
 
has anyone tried the "bar snake" it's msrp is just $30? sounds good to me
I also just removed the huge acerbis tank on it. It was like straddling a pregnant water buffalo. I have another tank "stock supposedly" but I cant get it to fit without the coil hitting it,. Some modification is in order here. Any pics of how the stock coil mounts will help
 
Learn to short shift
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the water cooled big bores don't like to rev
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, there like paint shakers
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That's the only way i could ride my 86 400 & i still had to tighten the head down 4-5 times
a year.
 
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