• Husqvarna Motorcycles Made In Sweden - About 1988 and older

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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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

CR500 1985 impressions

firecrackerkid said:
It's gonna be hot. I have room in the truck for you and your brother if you want a ride to Washougal to watch the nationals. Leaving Friday around noon. I am trying to get a camping spot at Cascade Locks KOA.
View attachment 28827

Reservation confirmed. room in the campsite for two more.
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I'll be there on Saturday.
Taking the grandson for the 3rd time and we have pit passes. Gonna do the autograph thing. I'd like to chat with some of the privateers too, like Derek Anderson.
Should be a fun day.
Dave
 
Back to CR500 impressions: Took her out last weekend...some trail riding but mostly hard-packed dirt logging type roads. Getting more comfortable with what this thing is capable of, but still not being stupidly confident. You want torque....you got it! Just a great combination of gear spacing and power delivery. I haven't even challenged the suspension, but it feels really good given it's age. The only part I'm still getting used to is the bike height. Heck, I'm 6'1" and can barely touch my tippy toes on the ground. That made for one embarassing moment when I came to a stop on a slight sideways incline and put my foot down to stop...but there wasn't any ground there and ended up overbalancing and 'falling over'. I'm just so accustomed to much lower seated bikes.

It's still a beetch to get neutral gear when at a standstill, but other than that the clutch feels and works fine. And I finally mastered the starting technique and got consistently 1 or 2 kick starts all day long. THAT made me feel good!
 
The clutch can be a nuisance but you will find yourself just catching neutral as you pull up after a short while, it becomes second nature.
 
suprize said:
The clutch can be a nuisance but you will find yourself just catching neutral as you pull up after a short while, it becomes second nature.
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Yep, I do that unconsciously on all my bikes. I just haven't got the feel yet for this one, especially with stiff MX boots on. I may try bringing it up to second gear, then tapping it down to neutral while rolling and perhaps get a bit more control on the lever movement.
 
Old Geezer said:
Back to CR500 impressions: Took her out last weekend...some trail riding but mostly hard-packed dirt logging type roads. Getting more comfortable with what this thing is capable of, but still not being stupidly confident. You want torque....you got it! Just a great combination of gear spacing and power delivery. I haven't even challenged the suspension, but it feels really good given it's age. The only part I'm still getting used to is the bike height. Heck, I'm 6'1" and can barely touch my tippy toes on the ground. That made for one embarassing moment when I came to a stop on a slight sideways incline and put my foot down to stop...but there wasn't any ground there and ended up overbalancing and 'falling over'. I'm just so accustomed to much lower seated bikes.

It's still a beetch to get neutral gear when at a standstill, but other than that the clutch feels and works fine. And I finally mastered the starting technique and got consistently 1 or 2 kick starts all day long. THAT made me feel good!
Click to expand...


Way to go! I've been riding my 87 430 WR every weekend and getting much better at starting it and riding it. I can usually start it 1st or 2nd kick. And I'm really getting to know what the bike is capable of. Sometimes I just marvel at what it (we) just rode. Starting to build more confidence. Nothing like "torque on demand" to help in the tough spots.

Those early 80's big bores are tall in the saddle. My 85 500 Auto was tall and I'm 6' 3". The later 80's are no so tall, my 87 430 has a nice height.
Dave
 
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