• 4 Stroke Husqvarna Motorcycles Made In Italy - About 1989 to 2014
     TE = 4st Enduro & TC = 4st Cross

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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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

Steering Head Maintenance

duggoey

duggoey

Husqvarna
Pro Class
My 2010 310 is nearly 2 years old with 5000km of trail riding. Puddles, mud and creek crossings are common here.

I dismantled and replaced every bearing in the rear shock linkage about 2 months ago as it was shagged and corroded. As the steering head and its bearings aren’t in mud all of the time I’m hoping they will be fine for a while longer.

What is everyone’s experience with the late model Italian huskies (-2001-2010 TE450/510 + 08-10 TE 310) steering head bearings? Do I need to pull mine apart yet? Movement is smooth with no resistance and no play up/down etc.
 
Sometimes there isn't much grease to begin with. I think I would take a look, a rusty bearing can feel smooth for a while.
 
If you did not do it when new pull them down and do it now. Drop the front wheel and forks. Its a snack after that.
 
Ok, I'm doing mine this afternoon. just like you Duggoey, I did my bearings and they were a mess and I'm guessing it's because of poor greasing. I've been thinking about the steering head. Guess it's time to get to it.
 
The grease that was already "packed" in the new linkage bearings/needles/rollers (genuine) was equivilent to that of spray on water dispersant... I am guessing the bearings that came from the factory were filled with roughly the same amount and consistency of grease, or lack thereof. I couldnt believe how light it was. I had filled them with Castrol waterproof grease. This on its own probably makes all of the difference if it had been done from the start.

I have heard that even the new Jap bikes, particularly the new WR's also contain bugger all grease. The way Ive heard to describe this is "Mr Yamaha packs just enough grease in the linkages to stop them rusting out on the boat ride over from Nihon."
 
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