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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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

Engine Seized

Russ

Russ

Husqvarna
AA Class
I was taking the 630 out for a quick spin this afternoon. After a km I was accelerating in 3rd gear at 40kmh when the bike seized, stalled & the rear locked up. Tried to restart it but no luck so pushed it home. Checked oil level, which was fine, then removed spark plug to check whether it'd turn over, but no. Put it in 2nd gear & tried to rotate rear tyre but no give at all. When pressing the start button (new battery) it doesn't turn over, but makes a noise as its trying to.

Bike has 28,000kms & is well maintained, with last dealer service only 800kms ago.

This has accelerated my decision to replace it, now I just need to decide between a 501 & 701, probably the former.

I am very disappointed about this, as the 630 has been a terrific bike, but I can't afford this type of thing happening in remote areas and hopefully a new bike will reduce such exposure. Had this happened 2 minutes later I'd have been on a 3 lane expressway doing 100kmh, so I was very lucky it happened at a controllable speed with limited traffic.

I can't recall anyone else on this forum citing a similar issue, so perhaps this is an anomaly.
 
Wow man- sorry to hear it. I understand the frustration - about a year and a half ago the end cap of my right side oil screen came loose and got hammered through the bottom of my engine casings by dumb luck (it ended up right under the con rod, which is why I say it got hammered though.) I was extremely frustrated and did look into throwing in the towel.

In the end a deep breath and better sense prevailed, in terms of thoroughly investigating cause/remedy and cost (to determine cost effectiveness of repair or replace.) In my case most of the engine internals were still in good shape, but I did have to replace the cases (which were 1100.00 US.) As pissed as I was (and still am, about the screen design) I decided it is an anomaly- like yours- in that there are just so few of these engines that prematurely go kaboom. It's a robust engine designed for longevity, albeit w/ some real head scratcher aspects factored in.

So as bad as I feel for you I think it's worth the time for a tear down as- even if you're hell bent on a new bike- you may do better to fix the 630 and then sell it as a runner. Don't know though- it's just going to depend on what the issue is and to what extent the damages are. There's also parting it out but, as you know, that's labor/time intensive so it takes a long time to recoup the value.

Please keep us posted as to what you learn. Best of luck to you.
 
Wow Russ, it`s too bad, and I understand your frustration

Please, keep us up to date. Might be is a tiny thing that you can fix easily...

But it rings me a bell that somebody reported an issue like yours. May be not.
 
So sorry to hear of this Russ. I can understand the dilemma to rebuild or replace. My 630 is in need of the same decision.
 
Thanks for the sentiments chaps.

The bike has been having issues for a few months, as noted in my earlier post:
http://www.cafehusky.com/threads/plug-fouling-hard-starting-backfiring-intermittent-smoke.83714/

At the time the dealer's advice was to "ride it & see how it goes". In hindsight we should have heeded the warning signs, as it was quite unnerving to have a bike lock up and stall under acceleration out of a round about with cars following - I didn't know what was happening because it was so unexpected and occurred so quickly.

Anyway, it's at the dealers already and they will remove the head and let me know the prognosis and likely cost. I suspect it relates to the metal oil filter screen that had disintegrated and found in the oil at the last service. The dealer's initial estimate for a full rebuild was $3K, but it is too early to tell at this point.

The dealer is steering me towards a 701 rather than 501, as he thinks the mix of tar and dirt I ride will be too much for the 501 and its narrow service intervals.
 
Yes, you're right. And I remember I asked you if the dealer had found out the problem...
I think it's dealer's fault not heeded the warning signs. As you say, if the rear locked up in a highway you could've had a mortal accident.
This can create us some kind of paranoia, and that's why I hope the dealer can find out what's wrong in the bike... maybe this way all TE630 owners can avoid to suffer a serious accident in the future
 
My friend just picked up a new 501 a few weeks ago and loves it. He has put about 500 miles on it duel sporting and it is a great bike for that purpose.

Paw Paw
 
Once I hear back from the dealer I'll post an update on the diagnosis.

I'll probably replace it with either the 501 or KTM 500EXC rather than the 701. May need to wait a few weeks though as the 2017 models are on their way & substantially revised for the first time since 2012.
 
Clutch basket maybe? Re the choice, sod buying a brand new bike! Get an early model KTM 690 if you want a 701 or an early KTM 500EXC if you want the 501. I don't know how much they are selling for in Aus but here they are charging £8000 for a single cylinder thumper that's going to get battered on the trails as an enduro or on the tar as a sumo. Just doesn't make sense to me paying that much for a utilitarian machine:confused:
 
Thanks for the suggestion re the clutch basket Flynn, which was also the first inclination of one fairly experienced Husky dealer I happened to be speaking with. I therefore called the dealer who has my bike & asked them to look at that first and bingo, the clutch basket was full of metal bits that had locked the gears solid.

They have tried to source parts in Australia with no luck, so have contacted someone in Hungary of all places.

It's great to have experienced fellow owners on this site, as the dealer was intending to start pulling the motor apart before I called him suggesting to look at the clutch basket first.

Re replacement bike, I've decided on a new 501, I just need to see how the new 17 model looks compared with the 16.

Thanks again.
 
Were they the original clutch basket washers, or had they been upgraded? If they were original, I'd be screaming at Husky about doing the work for free. Its clearly a design fault.
 
Homerb said:
Were they the original clutch basket washers, or had they been upgraded? If they were original, I'd be screaming at Husky about doing the work for free. Its clearly a design fault.
Click to expand...


Which Husky? Husky-BMW that built the bike? Husky-KTM that sells some parts and KTM-powered Huskys? SWM that builds nearly identical bikes in the old Husky plant and still hasn't changed the design of the spring cups?
 
Homerb said:
Were they the original clutch basket washers, or had they been upgraded? If they were original, I'd be screaming at Husky about doing the work for free. Its clearly a design fault.
Click to expand...


I'm also interested to know if they were the original clutch basket washers or the upgraded. It's the one million dollar question...
 
I did get and fit the clutch cush washers several months ago as part of the following group buy:

http://www.cafehusky.com/threads/te...shers-group-buy-info.82100/page-2#post-558276

The bike has done fewer than 1000km with the new ones in, 27000km without incident before that - Is it a coincidence that the clutch basket suffered damage so soon after this fitment? It may be, because the experienced dealer I spoke with immediately suggested the clutch basket without knowing these replacement washers had been fitted, so presumably there is a known weakness there anyway.
 
If the damage has nothing to do with the upgraded cup washers… might have been that the clutch basket was not correctly mounted… the rivets?

If not is the case… what other inner parts of the clutch could have failed?
 
Which Husky? Husky-BMW that built the bike? Husky-KTM that sells some parts and KTM-powered Huskys? SWM that builds nearly identical bikes in the old Husky plant and still hasn't changed the design of the spring cups?

Very good question!
 
Russ said:
I therefore called the dealer who has my bike & asked them to look at that first and bingo, the clutch basket was full of metal bits that had locked the gears solid.
Click to expand...

This confuses me a bit, there are no gears in the clutch basket. What gears were locked, the big one on the back of the basket?


Russ said:
I did get and fit the clutch cush washers several months ago as part of the following group buy:

http://www.cafehusky.com/threads/te...shers-group-buy-info.82100/page-2#post-558276

The bike has done fewer than 1000km with the new ones in, 27000km without incident before that - Is it a coincidence that the clutch basket suffered damage so soon after this fitment? It may be, because the experienced dealer I spoke with immediately suggested the clutch basket without knowing these replacement washers had been fitted, so presumably there is a known weakness there anyway.
Click to expand...

It would be awesome if you could get pics of the clutch basket/washers. I'm betting the failure has something to do with the washer installation, too much of a coincidence. What did your old washers look like with 27000km?

.
 
Xcuvator said:
I hate to rain on the party but the washers being harder and thicker will wear the cast aluminum clutch parts even faster and is a temporary bandaid.

A cushioned rear hub is more of a fix.
Click to expand...

I wonder whether this comment from the cush washer thread is what has happened. I asked the dealer, who agreed the original washers may have been deliberately designed as soft so as to aid the cushioning effect, & by replacing them with harder ones it may have transferred load elsewhere.

The bike is at the dealer, who sent me the following rough pics.
image.jpeg image.jpeg
 
I strongly disagree, the washers don't have any cushioning effect. It is the spring that does no matter what the material hardness. The extra thickness of washer may increase preload of spring not allowing the spring to absorb small loads.
 
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