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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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

Makeover

Time to make the wiring harness: Power for USB device, GPS, Contour camera, and a battery charge level indicator.


wiring.jpg
 
Fully loaded:
loaded.jpg


The kickstand finally got too frustrating, so I had the folks at a welding shop add a couple of inches, change the angle, and put on a bigger foot (in the process we put the spring on wrong - fixed):

kickstand.JPG
 
Jon, nice job on the stand. You should also consider welding a split tube on the back side of the stand, connected to the lug and fully welded down the sides. Take a look at my side stand thread elsewhere. It strengthens the connection of the tube to the solid lug, where they tend to break.
 
My tail section break LED went out on the trail. Luckily my riding buddy's family had a shop with tools, including a soldering iron. I ordered a replacement from NZ's cycletreads. My tail has now gone through three iterations.

1. The shop in NY offered to install an LED tail section for my bike. I agreed. They made a very home-brew affair, using a 3mil aluminium plate with a bend, drilling holes through the license plate itself to run the cables, leaving wires out, and using a very fragile plate holder. With no vertical support, the thing vibrated like crazy, and after the first dirt ride the LED strip for the brake light broke.

2. I decided to follow the shop's basic idea but do it myself. I went with a premade kit, the Radiantz Flex Plate 3. This tidied up the cables a bit, was much more solid, and lasted longer, but the 3mil support still vibrated, and over time the leds on the brake strip went out. The vibrations also cracked the metal frame under the tail.

3. I just installed a dirt bike tail (a DRC MotoLED Edge Tail Light Holder) and fabbed something from that using parts of the aluminum plate. Its smaller than the OEM tail by quite a bit, and with more rigid vertical support it vibrates less. I had a welding shop add extra thickness to the metal frame under the tail. Lets see if this does the trick.

Lessons learned: Avoid the single-strip LED stuff on dirt because if it fails, you lose the whole light. Don't ask busy shops to get too creative.



tails.jpg
 
One more welding job: (sorry for poor focus - was getting eaten by sandflies)

chain-guard.jpg


The top mount support for the chain guard snapped off when my chain's master link came apart in some sand. Thank goodness for zip-ties! The nearby garage had a spare link, then I got a new X-ring chain at Queenstown. This time I got a spare link to add to the toolkit.
 
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