• 4 Stroke Husqvarna Motorcycles Made In Italy - About 1989 to 2014
     TE = 4st Enduro & TC = 4st Cross

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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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

450TE (2003) overheating/headgasket advice please

Q

Q plate

Husqvarna
C Class
Hi I've bought this bike recently took it for a short test ride all seemed fine but haven't ran the bike much as ive had various bits stripped out to do different jobs although nothing to the cooling system which is untouched. I've got the bike back together now and had it running at idle for 5 minutes or so when I noticed fluid dripping from the rad overflow followed by steam. I've drained and replaced the coolant and had the same thing happen. Water pumps operating correctly. Ive read on the forum about running lean causing this and whilst it is probably running a little lean at idle I cant believe that alone would cause the overheating in just a few minutes or could it? Im thinking it might be the headgasket? Although the coolant pipes become firm but not rock hard and the plug whilst a bit pale is 'dry'
Any suggestions as to a definitive test on the head gasket was thinking about the dip test kit for coolant used on cars?

Regards AL
 
try this:
Reduce the amount of coolant in the rads so that the level of fluid just barely covers the fins when you are looking into the open cap.
Ride it for some time, 20-30 minutes. Keep moving and try not to stop too much or shut it off any.
Head back home and park it, let it set for about 10-15 minutes and pull the spark plug. Look for water drops.
After it cools down, inspect the level of coolant. it should be the same level as you started with.

You can try using one of those kits that use a colored fluid to detect exhaust gasses in your rad fluid, I tried it and it was not helpful.

You can try removing the cams and retorquing the head bolts, all 4 of mine were loose when I had my leaky head gasket, I had to replace it, tightening the headbolts did not solve my problem.
 
Appreciated, hadn't even thought about riding it as its been overheating so quickly but I can see the logic in trying what you suggest and maybe I'll give the fluid test a swerve AL
 
Your bike will overheat in 5 minutes of idling. The exhaust must have been glowing as well. I do not let my modern 4 strokes idle for more than a minute. Your bike is probably ok if this is the only problem.
 
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