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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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

  • 2 Stroke Husqvarna Motorcycles Made In Austria - About 2014 & Newer
     TE = 2st Enduro & TC = 2st Cross

TE/TC TX300 AER48 to WP Spring and open cartridge swap

robertaccio

robertaccio

Husqvarna
Pro Class
wp-aer-48-spring-kit_700px-1.jpg Note- I am not an internet test pro as so many guys think they are now-
Well I relented and swayed by suggestion from my very local and mechanically trusted suspension guy Suspension 101's George Spinali (tunes for current pro Noah K, as well as for a few of our local MX legends that everyone knows). I got Noah's LH WP cartridge and a new spring. (Noah will be on factory CV fork for 2020). S101 of course did all his personal tricks with the dampening (RHS) as well as with the preload on the spring side. Before riding I raised the forks up to ring 2.
I rode on Saturday as is and found she was way deep into the front and pushing so I stiffened to comp a few clicks, 10X better and still steered quick in the tight stuff.
Forget- started with sag check without touching @36 static and 105 race...George has been doing his homework, I had the WP 4.8 spring but S101 put on a RaceTech 5.0, I had like 14mm of preload on my 4.8 (too much) . The 5.0 has about 7mm just enough to keep the spring in place.
I did my front as well and it came up on the low side compared to my favorite Dwight Rudder test spec. sheet, so the front seemed high. But when riding as I said it was deep, S101 says don't even think about that with his set up. I rode easy because I was alone, then I led a an easy pace "tour" ride with 2 GFs of a couple of well known Baja racers that I ran into. I had some single track to rip a little and wow it felt good.
On way home I told S101 what I did with the forks, he said to go back to ring 1 and reopen the comp and maybe open it more so we get that first few inches of floaty blow through that keep those sharp rock hit smooth.
So that's where I am now for the next test.
The rear was really good but there are still LSCD and HSCD adjustments to make, HSCD is basically all the way open @2.75 turns out and LSCD is in the low 20s (he revalved to allow for these higher number settings) The goal here is to make it old (kinda fast) old guy plush but with very good bottoming resistance to match the AER48 cartridge in that respect.
PS Fletch I can feel the heavier feeling but its very much within the norm of what we have been riding forever.
It's every bit as good with bottoming resistance as it is now, but for me where its better is in corners when the bike's leaned over the front tracks better, it's more supple and stays planted.
More playing around to come. PS my disclaimer I am just an ammie like 99% of us, however I am usually a top 10% 50+ A/EXP class finisher (AMA and local club rider)
 
2nd ride test dropped forks/raised front to 1 on the tubes and opened comp 3 clicks. I was on ring 2 with more comp. Idea is too keep comp very light for sharp rocks but keep front up in travel. It worked great as well as having the bike drop in for corners with the light comp, I was afraid of the chopper effect with the 1 ring setting, the lighter comp offset that. BTW we lightened it 2 more comp settings for round 3. Reason is as hard as tried on downhill to uphill G outs I still have a couple inches of travel left at the bottom of the slider. George likes to work backwards so to speak, as for now we are further backwards to open comp until we can find bottom at the extreme incidence. Also dropping off steps as high as 5 feet she still maintains bottoming resistance , remembering that this is slow bike speed with high shock shaft speed (which the AER48 cartridge did as well) but with that more dampened feel of the oil/spring system. Still need to go fast on bike and hit some scary stuff at fast bike speed.
 
I'm gelling now especially after having a good ride with LR (on his Sherco300SEF) to key off of.
The forks are much better planted and able to take massive hits without drama. The best thing is the consistent feel. The WP kit is quite expensive at @ 700 bucks but I got lucky and mine for a stud deal came from another pro rider's bike that is required by Husky to use Cone Valve forks for 2020
 
Looks like I may be on the final decided set up of my forks. personal set up takes time and effort. bottoming resistance is top tier, but I was still looking for more "float" in those first few inches of travel, controlled but "loose" for skimming over those long bouncy loose rock filled stream beds. S101 has been keeping my file up to date and saw exactly where the last set up was and saw where he could still adjust the shim stack for more initial "bleed" for those HS sharp hits. This should be it. possible test with LR tomorrow or for sure on Sat morn. So I have been looking for almost a trials bike initial stroke but very progressive into mid with great bottoming resistance for those drop off and vertical rock face bottom high G hits. PS S101 has ported/relieved edges of my valves to smooth the oil flow.
 
you know we have all gotten (at the consumer level) thinking of instant fixes. For example turn in the suspension and get it back working perfectly. I've been around world championship teams (WSBK and others) It takes weeks and even months to get the suspension sorted for each rider. So for me it's no issue plus its a 1 hour job off and 1 hour job back on (1 hour is pushing it). All good , we did some different stuff for experimentation as well so that takes some time as well. I have 2 rides on this setup now, good thing is now I believe any desired adjustments can be made through clickers. BTW we installed a 5.0-6.0 progressive wound rear spring, something I thought I would never do on a linkage bike. I will do just clickers, rear sag and fork projection movements for now to keep dialing the thing in. Also conditions matter, yesterday we on post rain sponge dirt last Fri we were on the usual SoCal dry hacky stuff.
 
BTW I must also add, that my go to guy for suspension over the last decade practically has been the magic of Ty Davis at ZipTy Racing.
I jumped ship only for convenience of a 25 minute drive to S101 , who is located between where we mostly ride and home. My disclaimer is the 2.5 hour drive to the high dez was never easy, value wise it was always great both in results and service, it's just a matter of time and distance.
 
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