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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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

610 Handlebar Replacement

Spencer Cross

Spencer Cross

Husqvarna
I need to replace the bars on my '07 SM 610 because they're slightly bent from a lowside taken by the previous owner. I'm pretty new to the bike so I'm thinking I'll stick to the stock bars for the time being, but the original part from Husky is pricier than I had hoped. I'm wondering if anybody can recommend a good aftermarket bar that's the same as or close to stock but not $90? I've been looking through the forums and Googling, but handlebars have turned out to be a lot more complicated than I would've expected and I haven't yet found a good answer.

I'm also totally happy to look at aftermarket bars that aren't stock but are widely agreed upon to be an improvement. I just didn't see anything like that in my research so far.
 
I have ProTaper EVO in the Windham bend... They cost $90. Most of the 9/8" bars are up near that sort of money so the price on the stock bars are more than reasonably priced for an OEM part.
 
While we're on the subject, can anyone give me some insight into how important it is to actually replace the bars? The bend isn't extreme. In fact, I'd already been riding for a couple of weeks and hadn't even noticed it; a friend noticed it and pointed it out. Is there a performance or safety concern, or is it primarily aesthetic? I'm just running around town, not racing or anything, so if it's not something that's going to endanger me I'm tempted to hold off on replacing them at all.
 
Spencer Cross said:
While we're on the subject, can anyone give me some insight into how important it is to actually replace the bars? The bend isn't extreme. In fact, I'd already been riding for a couple of weeks and hadn't even noticed it; a friend noticed it and pointed it out. Is there a performance or safety concern, or is it primarily aesthetic? I'm just running around town, not racing or anything, so if it's not something that's going to endanger me I'm tempted to hold off on replacing them at all.
Click to expand...
You are going to be counter steering. This could put some odd wear on the front tire and make you work harder. Not to mention making things less than desirable overall. Also, check the front in alignment, to make sure the forks are sitting in the triple square. Often a crash and knock things out of whack, while the bars are still straight. However, I'm gonna guess that your bars a bent based on what you said. Still, check your triples i.e., loosen bolts, check alignment and tighten bolts. You should check them after crashes as fork tubes can get twisted a bit.
As for bar recommendations, just gotta keep hunting until you find a price and style that fits you.

With that, I need new bars too for my TE450. I just bent mine more than a little bit. Damn whoop jumps, or should I say, damn crappy rider skills.
 
Thanks for the input, Logroller. I'll be sure to double check the alignment. In the meantime, I think I'll go ahead and order the original Husky bars for now and consider replacing them later once I'm more familiar with the bike.
 
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