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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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!
Using the husky stem really simplifies the swap. Looks like a matter of finding a suitable fork set / triple clamps and you are good to go. And, as always, this can be easily reverted back to stock.
I was able to score the KX250 as a parts bike for $150 as the lower end had failed and the engine was not worth repairs. I then sold on eBay $225 for the rest of the parts minus the front end. After parts to rebuild the brake caliper, fork seals and covers, wheel bearings and seals I'm just about even on this project.
Justintendo, I'm not sure as to which years KX may be best to start with as my deal was based on economy and availability as much as anything. I scored a front end for a 95 WXE from a fellow cafe member but that deal took a while to come to fruition and I made the decision to move forward with the KX unit. The WXE is a 43 mm while the KX is a 46 mm unit. I'll end up using the WXE for another project. I agree the straight up bolt on option is a great way to go. The KX trees required a sleeve to be fabricated as the KX stem is shorter and larger in diameter. Straightforward turning job; I made it with a slight interference fit. I heated the tree up and pressed in the sleeve then pressed the husky stem in. From there it's simply a matter of bolting the parts on. I also appreciate the rubber mounted handle bar mounts for additional vibration damping.
The wr models stayed with the steel stem which fits the exact bearings longer than the cr version. I suspect similar in the 4 stroke bikes. I suspect changing the cup and cone like to make ktm (2004 and whatever uses that size) work would be the case for the cr and possibly to current. The wr from this section probably ends up higher in the front with most more modern track oriented front end swaps.
The clamp offset seemed similar but I didn't measure it. I'm unsure of any work done to the forks; I replaced the seals and wipers. The bushings seemed fine without much sign of wear. The major difference I noticed was that the front end no longer "pushes out" in the turns. I ride gravel roads a bunch and the front wanted to slide out often. These don't do that. At 70 mph indicated on the speedometer it's rock steady. I planted the front end in a small ditch in an effort to bottom them out but they don't bottom. I'm on the lookout for a suitable jump to try next. Tight trails are more the norm here and the new setup seems to steer better. It could be that the old forks simply needed adjusted but I do like the rubber mounted bars and the more powerful brakes.
my forks pushed too until i set my sag correctly with a different rear spring. dont get me wrong, im not knocking the fork swap, just dont forget about setting up the rear as well. i seem to have the 87-88 forks working pretty well now..cant say they work all that much worse than my WER built showa forks on my 95
84scrambler, you are right. At least static sag and rider sag can be measured, taking the guess work out. Justintendo is right, once the sag is balanced front to back the improvement should be huge. I need to focus on suspension setup more. I don't have it "yet" either!
