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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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

Poor handling 09 txc 450

andy man.. my 2 lines was the fork height through the tripple clamps on the outside..

people better than me have suggested that if the fork height is adjusted to the first line this will promote a more stable front-end at speed. You can raise or lower the fork from this point as a means to quicken or slow the steering respectively ie more rings showing better turning more rings more stable at speed..

thanks
 
DOH! Yep. I mis-read what you were telling me. Yes, I definitely need to play with the fork height. Mine is currently 2 lines down as well.
 
Please take it to a suspension guru and have it set to your weight and primary type of riding. I can tell you that the Husky is light years ahead of a 03 kato in all facits of steering, breaking, suspension and cockpit geometry. I ride with those bikes all the time and we swap rides quite often. In fact I find the new KTMs to be pretty loosy goosy to ride-hard to pin point the cause they just feel slightly viby and vague. The Huskys have a really planted and solid feel about them.
 
andyman;86676 said:
No track riding, this is all fast woods, and slow slow slow singletrack.
Even tooling around the grass at the campground, the difference is staggering.
Click to expand...

If it is that obvious that is good news actually, it will be easier to figure out.

andyman;86907 said:
I think I will set up a short course with markers so that I can try and do repeatable tests. take notes, make changes, take more notes, make more changes, etc.
Click to expand...
Great idea!
  • Change everything you can think of.
  • tire pressure up/down - on both ends (way up and way down)
  • fork height up/down
  • change the sag, or what would be easier is to add 2 gallon jug of water somewhere on the bike for added weight
My point is, you can do some massive/weird things, for a short test ride, and get decent information. Then send the suspension off to a tuner, if that is your direction. The information you collect should be useful regardless.

I drove myself nuts trying to figure out why my bike rode terrible on the street at 25mph, but others thought is was ok. Those other people weighed much more than I did. Finally I strapped 4 jugs of water on (for testing) and really noticed the difference. My problems were a combination of wheel balancing, and in the end, a re-valve of both ends.
 
Loose spokes may not be your issue, but you need to have had a wrench on them at least a couple off times since new. I know this as I have a set of spokes sitting right next to me for my DRZ, that I neglected to tighten during break in. Needless to say it felt terrible untill the spokes were tightened and then 2 broke later on while truing the wheel.
 
Coffee;86983 said:
I drove myself nuts trying to figure out why my bike rode terrible on the street at 25mph, but others thought is was ok. Those other people weighed much more than I did.
Click to expand...

I had the same issue with my 02 model CR ... Guys that weighted >40 lbs more than me would ride my bike and liked the suspension ... and it would beat me to death when riding ... I had to have it re-valved for the trails ...

This TXC has been alot friendlier bike for this ~150 lb guy :) At a rider weight of ~230 ... UR fork springs might need changing to something stiffer ...
 
Just curious what from tire your running on your bike? my 09 450 with the stock michelin felt really loose, pushed through the corners, and was just scary to ride, i changed the front to a tire i liked on my 09 ktm
and that made alot of difference, then i changed the sage to 3.5, and set the front tubess at the second line, and now as far as chassy/handling, they are pretty equal.
Just my 2 cents
 
Good tuning info here guys. I hope that helps you, Andyman.

Just for the record, my 09 TE450 is at two lines above the triples and works great. It was at three lines when I received it and it was twitchy. Dropping one line calmed things down just enough.
 
Yeah, good stuff. Thanks for bringing up tires! I hadn't thought about that. I do have the stock michelin, and suffer some of the same charicteristics that you described.
 
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