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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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

Found a slice of heaven in Illinois! ya gotta see!

C

Chums

Husqvarna
Pro Class
The off road club I'm in set up a "viewing" at the Moto Armory in Illinois. If you've never heard of it like me its worth a google search. They're know as having the largest privet collection of vintage bike (mostly dirt bikes) in the world at over 500 and growing daily. Its owned by the co-owner of Springfield Armory, which is cool in itself. My mind is still blown by the volume and quality of bikes here, I spent 2 hours looking and still found stuff that was totally one off factory stuff. I think I saw 4-5 brands I never knew existed and maybe 4-5 more that I'd heard of bit never seen! Very very cool and free!

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I took a picture of this last one because most people wouldn't understand what they are truly looking at. This is John Dowds kx500 but, the kx500 never came with a two piece side clutch side cover and this is the mythical factory two piece cover that's like a unicorn now and very impossible to find a photo of yet alone see first hand! There is stuff like this all over if you know what your looking at!
 
Had they just stuck with the original motor Folan built for them they would have been good. They thought they could build and engine and went broke trying.
 
Not sure what the Folan configuration was but couldn't have been worse. Headpipe length was a serious problem with those. No one wants a big-bore four-stroke with no low-end.
 
I felt sick seeing a 15yr old bike with tech that's considered "new" and "revolutionary" on bikes today. Aluminum frame, fuel injected, slanted motor and on and on.
Click to expand...

Problem was, the Aluminum frame was a copy of the worst one ever (Honda 97-99), the fuel injection worked poorly and flamed out constantly, slant motor was ill-designed. Airbox (frame) choked motor so they threw on a hoakey second intake/filter as a bandaid, headpipe was so short motor only made top-end power. And on, and on, and on. The "new" and "revolutionary " part of the tech now is that it works well.
 
i got to ride one of the cannondale bikes back in the day and wasnt impressed. my friend had just gotten a new yzf 400 so i had high expectations. of course we held a bunch of drags to see how it did and my 500 husky roundly cleaned its clock every time. this seemed to anger the guy much more than getting beat by the yzf every time..i remember him saying "but it has a metal tank and dual shocks, what the heck IS that thing? good times..
 
I think one of my favorite bikes was Mike Young’s 1995 Vertemati GP500. That thing seemed bare bones and clean but then looking closer had the carb hooked into the frame and a filter under the seat, pretty cool!
 
The Honda in that first group of pictures is actually a Honda factory built CR500 aluminum frame built from a cr250 frame using all new parts as kind of a fair well to the cr500 production. Built by Honda with ohlins, pro circuit, troy Lee and others. So yes Honda technically did make a 500 Aluminum frame bike and it was popular enough that Service Honda jumped on it.
 
Chums said:
I think one of my favorite bikes was Mike Young’s 1995 Vertemati GP500. That thing seemed bare bones and clean but then looking closer had the carb hooked into the frame and a filter under the seat, pretty cool!
Click to expand...

Gotta love google.

That thing is very close to the same design as my 94 FE501 berg. Motor looks almost identical. Lots of similar design features. Interesting.

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