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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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

close gear ratio

I like the advantages of a close ratio transmission because there is always that "perfect gear" available for the track or trail. The disadvantage to this is that you have to customize your gearing externally using sprockets and then you either end up having something low for the trail or tall for the highway, and rarely a happy medium. Wide transmissions are great for utility but tend to have open gaps as ARH has previously mentioned. A good compromise is a transmission which has an extra low first and an extra tall top gear while maintaining the close ratio in the middle.
 
Yeah, a crawler gear is a nice addition, but as an aftermarket solution it would have been expensive as it would have required a new gearbox input shaft, first being integral with the shaft.I could live with the option of a slightly higher 5th and 6th, but it's not gonna happen now... As it stands dropping into the optimum rpm means short shifting, because if I use all the over-rev (the old motor is still pretty fit) I pretty much have to shift up two gears to hit the sweet part of the torque curve.

Many engine components were shared between the 250 - 510, so the close ratios that were necessary for the tiddlers were overkill imo for the bigger bikes. No big bore thumper expressly requires six cogs that closely spaced - unless it has serious power delivery issues and we all know that wasn't the case here!

The top few percent of competition riders may be able to exploit optimally narrow ratios (and their teams would be minded to e.g. change final drive ratios between stages), but for most real world customers too-narrow gaps can cause a number of problems:

1) Every time a rider has to shift he (or she) loses drive, plus there is always the possibility of losing traction or otherwise unsettling the bike, either under acceleration or braking. There's always the opportunity for a missed shift too. No needless shifts = less risk. For free.

2) More shifts means more fatigue for both rider and machine. More distraction too.

3) Many bikes are bought expressly because they can be plated. Not everyone races! We don't all have trailers and anyway, a bit of tarmac is often unavoidable when exploring or jumping from trail to trail (or when seeking out some lunch!). Having to gear low to keep a bike useable on dirt turns even the shortest asphalt stretch into a miserable experience - machine and rider fatigue is increased and fuel range goes through the floor. We supposedly do this stuff for fun!

Consider also the supermoto guys. How are you supposed to gear for the flat out dash down the straight and the dusty, walking speed hairpin that leads to the double? Bog. Crash.

Sorry about the rant, but selling unmodified competition bikes as plateable / leisure is just lazy and I don't think that it does anything to increase participation levels in offroad. Obviously a lot of manufacturers are more or less guilty here and I'd like to see all of them applying a bit more "customer focus". The factory could always offer a close ratio cluster in the "special parts" catalogue. Side loading cassettes would be nice too.

Rant over - I promise! :)
 
I struggle with my TE310 transmission also, I love it on the track, but dont like it as much on the trails. I ran a 50t rear last year which was good on the single track, but too low on the highway, I switched to a 45t this year love it on the road to the trails, "I can maintain 50mph no problem" but after yesterday riding some technical steep single track I have found it is too high, I really had to abuse the clutch. I am going to order a 47t and see how that goes, i still love the handling of this bike so I am not willing to jump ship yet.
 
Guess I am goofy. I think my TE is only carrying a plate to allow me to get to the dirt. I like the fact, once it is uncorked,
It's basically a TXC 511. With the seat concepts seat and some restraint (50/55mph) I can travel in reasonable
comfort to my riding areas, then I have a real dirtbike, I can ride and compete with the guys that trailered their
bikes there, and still enjoy the ride home....I have come to love the close ratio trans., for tight woods stuff, and that is
what it's top priority is, on the rest, TT track, more open stuff it's usually a 3 gear bike, and works great...that granny
low makes it easy for me to twist in and out and hop over trash, without the clutch, 6th is tall enough to outrun my
Abilitys off road. Lots of dual sports out there with wide ratio trans, most of them really slanted towards the road side,
They are fine for slower trail work, but are very tiring trying to go fast. These company's spend a lot of time and money
To build bikes we will buy. I think if they could build one we all would like, they would, must be harder than we think..
 
I sometimes think I'd like a wider gear ratio, like when I'm commuting. But then I get on the dirt and I forget all about needing taller gears. Besides, 60 on the roads around here is plenty fast. The deer roadkill count here makes it prudent to go slower. I have plenty of back roads around here. I can chose to stay off the highway and ride the 50mph county roads. Leave the roadkill count to the tourons.
Most of the other wide tranny bikes are designed to do both dirt and asphalt and they do. The TE is designed for dirt and they slapped a plate on it. I had a DRZ that did it all but did nothing great. I'd slide the DRZ and it felt like it wanted to lay down (and it did plenty of times). The TE invites me to ride the slide. Dirt and asphalt require different geometry and gearing. You need a quiver of bikes... not necessarily a bad thing.
It's all in accepting what you got... don't like it, get something else. I hear KTM is going to make a wider geared Husky... snicker.
BTW I run 13/50 gearing... topped out is 80mph.
 
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