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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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

a little fork oil leaking

T

towpro

Husqvarna
B Class
I store my Husky tied down to my bike lift table. Not tight, just enough to keep it upright.
I noticed the right fork is leaking a little fluid while sitting on the table. I can't count the drops, but in 2 days enough oil runs out that it leaves a trail around 6" long as it runs down the table (that is not level)

Before I replace the seal has anyone heard of trying to clean the seal by running 35mm film up between the fork tube and seal? did it work? At only 250 miles on the bike, I can't believe the seal is bad, it has to be a piece of dirt stuck in it.

I will check the tube, but short of finding a nick from a rock, I can't see how a 250 mile old seal can fail like that. The forks have never been apart accept for me opening the top to flush out the fluid when I changed over to 5w Amsoil suspension fluid and new springs that match my weight.
 
Cleaning can help ESP after mud riding ... I use a feeler gauge but if you try the gauge, be careful you do not cut the seal with the gauge as they are metal and thin and might can cut ..

Also bleed the air from them to release all pressure from them ...

I would not want more than the weight of the bike on the seals when storing any length of time ..

What bike is it? Some have forks that are born to leak ...
 
It's an 08 TE250. Last night I released the tie down and realized the suspension was not compressed at all. All they are doing is holding it up straight. I doubt it's any pressure that needs to be bleed. Since I changed the fluid I have ridden it around 30 street miles (last weekend I rode it to the shop for state inspection)
 
On my te510 i had this happen 3 times. Every time
a film or a thin fealer gauge did the trick. I'm still on the original seals after 2900 km (mainly s/t).
 
On my te510 i had this happen 3 times. Every time
a film or a thin fealer gauge did the trick. I'm still on the original seals after 2900 km (mainly s/t).
 
Yes the film should work. This should be done as part of pm. You can buy seal cleaners cut & made for the cause or use simple poker cards.[52 seal cleaners
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Don't use the Joker, I've had bad luck with that one
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I even bought the actual seal cleaner tool & used it for a template to cut out the playing cards to get the hook effect that it had. Lot's of leakage then replace the seal. Small leakage you can get by with until you get uncomfortable with the front end. By the way, don't take one card from the deck & put the deck back w/o the missing card. I tried it & it made for a very confusing game. By the way, i also have my bike on a rack w/o any problems. Just no pressure to the forks [or very very little] & bleed the air a lot. Should be a habit before, during & after the ride.
 
The fork seals should be able to take pressure without leaking. Every time the fork compresses you got pressure. In fact when you adjust the oil level, you are really setting the amount of air in the forks. This air compresses as the springs compress and works in conjunction with the metal springs. The oil level is a way to fine tune the metal springs.

I agree with bleeding the air pressure out after a long ride (while bike is raised with no weight on forks), but that is only to get you back to the 0 pressure level you started with when you built the forks the first time.

I know a (skinny) guy who raced a (modified) XR250 in the AA enduro class in the 90's. He used to strap the bike down in the truck and compress the forks around 4", then bleed the air. He said he just couldn't get the springs right and it felt best with the negative pressure.
I also have owned several street and dirt bikes with shrader valves to add pressure to the forks to fine tune the forks.
A fork seal should hold a couple PSI of pressure.

Now that this weekends "honey do" list is done, I will try the film trick tomorrow.
Thanks
 
I use an old tear off from my goggles to clean around the seal, as stated before, slide the wiper down then run the tear off around the fork seal on an angle to get any debris out, be careful with feeler gauges of anything metal as they can damage the fork seals ( I've only heard this can happen, never seen it myself).
do you use a fork saver block?? I haven't had any problems since I got mine.
 
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