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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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

Help with steering Bearings?

MChammer

MChammer

Husqvarna
AA Class
After reading many posts about winter maintenance projects, and doing most of them to my bike in the down-season, I'm down to looking at my steering bearing. All seems fine, but I feel I need to check them out and if nothing else, clean and re-grease them as my bike has 2 seasons under it's belt. I've done a search here and found nothing. Does anyone who has the knowledge feel up to posting some detailed instructions/pictures like what Seahorse has done for wheel bearing maintenance?
 
sorry I don't have time to make a write up with pictures but I just did mine so I'll tell you what I did. You can probably find a write up with pictures on TT for one of the other bike brands. It's all pretty much the same.


The big time saving trick I was taught is to not take off any levers, cables, wires etc. Leave them all attached. Also you don't have to take of the front wheel or forks if you don't want. It's a little cumbersome but do-able esp if you have a helper.

Put the bike on a stand with the front wheel at least a couple inches off the floor. If you can get at the nut on top of the triple clamp without removing the handlebars, do it. I had to take my bars out of the clamps. Just take them off and lay them over the front of the bike or hang them from the ceiling with a bungee to get them out of the way. Same with the top triple clamp. Pull it off the forks and lay it over the front of the bike or hang it. It will still have the gauge cluster, if you have one, on it. Now take some channel lock pliers and spin that nut on the steering stem off. It shouldn't be very tight. Now you can pull the top bearing out and you can drop the whole assembly out the bottom a couple inches, enough to inspect the lower bearing. If it looks good, I would re-pack it right there and slam it back up in there. Then repack the top bearing and re-assemble.

If you don't like what you see and you need to take the lower bearing out to clean it, you can take off the front wheel and pull the assembly out of the headstock completely. Then the lowering bearing should just pull off the stem.

Re-assembly is just the reverse. Pretty straightforward.

I found mine to be like new but gummy. I took them out and cleaned them, repacked with Belray, and now they are smooth like butter.

Now, the rear pivot bearings were another story. Fugly. ProMotion suspension guy is replacing those now.
 
I am sure you can figure out how to get the top bearing in your hand and the lower one still stuck on the lower tripple clamp assembly. I guess it depends on how many water crossings and at what depth and speed they were done at to effect the lower one. Chaces are the top one is fine. Copmpressed air works wonders at cleaning bearings. Something as simple as spraying wd40 and then spraying air a few times making the rollers and cage whirl around will clean them out. I find spraying in such a manner the gunk goes on a piece of cardboard and then disposing of the cardboard works for me. Then re grease and re assemble.
 
Put a block under the back wheel that limits the droop factor once the spanner nut comes off.

Or else your bike does a wheelie off the back and everything hits the floor- hard.
 
I really think it is good to drop your front wheel, front brake and suspension. I do not take the bottom bearing off but give it a good clean out and repack. I feel the botton bearing seat and if it was grooved then the seat and the bearing would be replaced. The top bearing is easily removed, cleaned and repacked. I use Bel Ray grease-it seems to retard water ingress best for mput a fair bit in-dont be miserly.
With the forks off it is a good time to drop the wipers and give the space inside a clean, including the seal. I also have a play with the bottom clickers (move them up and down) and WD 40 them-this stops seizing. The brake is looked at closely and given a better clean and the wheel bearings are also cleaned and repacked with new grease. All up 2 hours.
 
Project completed last night - all went well with tempus fugit's instructions. Both bearings were fine, but I didn't think too highly of their choice of grease - what appeared to be white lithium grease. I used a toothbrush and mineral spirits to remove all grease, and on the one still on the triple clamp I also sprayed it with brake cleaner to get all the grease out, then dried everything with compressed air (making sure I didn't allow the bearings to spin like seahorse mentioned) and then repacked with good quality waterproof Amsoil grease. I am amazed how helpful a website like this can be when you have so many people that share a common interest while having many different professions/knowledge. I think back to the 70's and 80's when I last had dirt bikes (WR430) and how much trial and error took place because of the limited information available. Thanks again Cafe Husky members****************************************
 
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