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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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

449/511 Skid Plates

motosportz mike

CH Sponsor
Just thought I would let the cafe husky people know we now have the 449/511 skid plates in stock for all of the models TE/TC/TXC/SM, 2011 and 2012s. The price is just 99.95 (plus shipping) and I will be including a free oil filter (of course for the 449/511) with purchase for a limited time. Please contact me (motosportz mike) for this offer or any details . Here are a couple of pics on my bike.
 

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Thanks for the skidplate, Mike.
Good skid plate for the money.
It's a bit of a pain in the ass to install with six u-clamps, but not as bad as I thought it might be.
Once on there it is very solid.
Haven't had it off yet, but the clamps might stay in place and make the second time easier.
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Very nice, thanks for the lovely pictures Fasteer. I purchased one as well a couple of weeks ago. The skid plate is well made, most are only welded on one side, but this one is welded on both sides. :thumbsup: The hardware looks nice, I was wondering how difficult the install would be. I did look around and found different bolts to replace the Ricochet ones which would work fine. I found some robust Suzuki stainless foot peg bolts #09106-08167, which are the same height as the originals with washers, but larger in diameter. This weekend, I was out at the desert races in Barstow, CA, talking to a couple of the ktm pros and they all use grade eight hex heads. I asked if they would tear them off or round them over? I was told the bolts are hardened and would not be damaged. I'll probably just run my ss bolts.

Putting on the skid plate was a complete pain in the ass. The way I did it was to attach all four lower clamps, adjust the plate around and then tighten the two furthest down. Then work your way up tightening the next two. The last two (six in total) can then be held in place and torqued down. Over all, the skid plate felt heavy duty and protects the starter, though I would like to of had a little more material over the clutch cover. Also, an additional hole needs to be drilled in order to get a wrench up to loosen/adjust the shift lever. Brake snakes are a absolute must on these machines and the skid plate makes an awesome drill point.

Haven't had it off yet, but the clamps might stay in place and make the second time easier.

I may try to tack weld the u-bolts carefully to my frame to ease with removal/re-install
 

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Got mine yesterday with some other goodies. Its time for an oil change then a bath (Husky not me its not Sunday) then I'll wrestle that thing on. Its beefy to say the least, luckily I have a Harley so the torx tools are on hand. If I didn't already have the sockets I would be swapping bolts, but I like the clean round heads for sure!

Then if I have time, the sexy rear rotor guard is next.
 
Ok all ready to ride. The skid plate took about 30 min to install. I hung the plate off the front frame tubes loosely then positioned the rest of the mounts and held them in place with masking tape. The sexy rear rotor guard took about 10 mins. That's all for now, gotta get it dirty now...

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I've had good luck with mine so far, no rattles. I did destroy the anodizing on mine from using too harsh of a detergent, hopefully I can fix it. Plate adds a little weight, but it lowers the center of gravity.
 
Well I went for a 70 mile ride yesterday and it stayed in place nicely. Didn't do any stump sliding or rock bashing, but it did a real nice job of keeping the mud off the engine. I think it does a great job of further strengthening the lower frame cradle. I wonder how well the mounting clamps will stay in position after being on for a while.

If I were a better welder I would tack them on, but perhaps a little dab of epoxy would do the trick.

By the way, Mike was great to work with and my order arrived in two days. Saturday I worked on the bike and yesterday I was pulling power wheelies in the super tacky. Thanks Motosportz!
 
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