• 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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.

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    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!

Do we really NEED barkbusters?

Bark busters don't necessarily have to attach to the end of your handle bars. There are some that do keep the cold out and protect against impacts without boxing your hands in. You can also run composite arc levers, they won't break. There is a company working on very strong non-enclosed bark busters, they should be out soon.
 
I ride in the tighter woods and would hate riding without them. Also been using them for 30 years and zero issues with broken wrists. EVERYONE here runs them and they are VERY necessary.
 
Haha I think I can agree with you on that. I've pinballed myself off a few trees in that exact order.
There are some single track trails I ride where Im actually hitting trees on both sides at the same time. Some stuff they used to use for the RORR enduro apprarently. A friend of mine did an enduro last summer and actually broke both metal wraparound handguards on his DRZ. I think we definitely need them out here in the East.
 
Bark busters are not much help on Yucca or Joshua trees. They are armed with sabers. I use my handle bars to steer around them.
:)
 
Cut my bars to 29" and heaviest bark busters I can get. I still destroy them on trees, rocks, downfall and trailer incidents. A lot of our riding is through burns now and it is getting worse. The new pine thickets are extremely dense and a constant battle to ride through. We are going to have someone carrying a hedge trimmer now when clearing so he can nock the limbs back and all the seedlings down so we can have a 3' wide trail anyway.
 
Radar said:
Bark busters are not much help on Yucca or Joshua trees. They are armed with sabers. I use my handle bars to steer around them.
:)
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Speaking of Yucca trees, one of those little bastards jumped out in front of me this weekend! Those things hurt. :eek:

yucca-plant1.jpg
 
wallybean said:
Cut my bars to 29" and heaviest bark busters I can get.
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In my first racing career I used to cut my bars down to 28-29" with bark busters and did just fine. In my second racing career (vet class after 10 years off serious racing) I quickly learned the hard way I was way faster and safer with the stock width 30-31". Southern Ontario enduros and hase scrambles are pretty tight, and with the wider bars it gives me more leaverage when I do clip a tree and I often do. With the extra leaverage it doesn't throw me off balance as much and I rarely go down. Also with wider bars stearing accuracy is much improved and I don't clip as many trees even in the tight stuff. As I got older I found I don't have the same strength to run narrow bars. And yes bark busters are a necessity up here, everyone runs them for offroad in Ontario.
 
I run Cycras and would say I NEED them, I mostly ride tight high Sierra single track, some trails the trees are so close you have to stop and lean the bike both ways to get through, they save my hands often. I believe in running them tight so they wont swivel, when my bike hits the ground (which it does often) they save my levers.
 
McKay said:
How about the always-talked-about person who has two broken wrists from going over the front and getting trapped? I like mine but they are like tanks!
I didn't think about inadvertent front brake being hit and locking up, that may be reason enough to leave them be.
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Most people know when to let go of the bike. It would be possible you could get flipped over so fast you don't have time before you're stuck, but I project the odds of that ever happening to me at 4 billion to 1. And the odds of me breaking a lever without full on guards on at 1 to 1.
 
KXcam22 said:
I have seen more legs and arms in the back wheel than hands in the barkbusters. This year, I did have a friend manage to get his finger into the fork stop during a crash which severed the first joint of one finger. We are still not sure how he did it. Now we call him nine. Cam.
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I had a friend a few years ago who crashed and got his hand caught between the chain and the rear sprocket. It was pretty ugly:eek:! He suffered permanent nerve damage in his hand but still kept riding after he healed up. We called him "eggo" (as in waffle) afterwards:).
 
who is this mystery person who broke both wrists by goin over the bars & getting them trapped in his barkbusters?! sounds like a load of frog poo & scare tactics to me. could happen i guess, but i could win lotto too. generally id like to think id let go of the bars well before i was in front of my bike. my brother doesnt run them because he thinks they dont look 'cool'(i disagree, acerbis multiplo & racetech look pretty good to me!). hes also had to replace 3 clutch levers, ride his bike out of tight single track with no clutch at all(snapped off @ perch) which as you could guess was hard goin on a crf450r & his grips/bar ends look rather shabby. but hey as long as you look cool right? not to mention if you have a hydro clutch how expensive it is if you damage a master cylinder(brake too for that matter). first thing i put on a bike. good for smashing through trees & mainly crash protection(i fall off too much i guess). 1 thing that makes me wonder is why some people run them parallel with their levers & not the ground/horizontal? mine are always horizontal & never ever broken a lever or done any damage whatsoever! id have thought being in line with the levers wouldnt give you very good wind/brush protection & theyd just spin downwards when you crashed? i too have seen a little finger taken off by chain/sprocket in a crash. ugly. we also call him '7 of 9'(only 7 fingers of 9 digits left)
 
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