• Husqvarna Motorcycles Made In Sweden - About 1988 and older

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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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

Well I couldn't help myself - 1983 500 XC

As for your mid range jetting...if it has the 44mm and not the later 40mm carb, those 500s were notorious for that mid range blubber, Husky went to a smaller 40mm after '83 because it was nearly impossible to get it to run right. There was a "secret" special needle jet for that 44mm carb, but I cant recall what number it was now. If you have a Lectron on the way, personally, I would not waste any time fiddling with the Mikuni.
 
At some point you should check out the swingarm pivot. My 82 CR250 has been reinforce at least once, and needs it again on the chain side as the mount wallows out before long.....no doubt a 500 gives it an even harder workout :eek: As I recall this was a common fix back in the day.
 
oregonsage said:
At some point you should check out the swingarm pivot. My 82 CR250 has been reinforce at least once, and needs it again on the chain side as the mount wallows out before long.....no doubt a 500 gives it an even harder workout :eek: As I recall this was a common fix back in the day.
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it is a little wallered out. Will be fixing that some day. Is there a reason the swingarm bolt had a nut on each end? Would rather weld one end so I can just tighten one side.
 
Kartwheel68 said:
As for your mid range jetting...if it has the 44mm and not the later 40mm carb, those 500s were notorious for that mid range blubber, Husky went to a smaller 40mm after '83 because it was nearly impossible to get it to run right. There was a "secret" special needle jet for that 44mm carb, but I cant recall what number it was now. If you have a Lectron on the way, personally, I would not waste any time fiddling with the Mikuni.
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Kinda what I was thinking after riding a good amount of old big bore 2 strokes. Big part of the reason I want to explore the Lectron for these bikes.
 
justintendo said:
very interesting kartwheel...i have not heard that before and MANY sing their praise...they certainly arent cheap, and some are pretty difficult to install
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Yes, many do sing their praises, but I know quite a few people now who will never buy another set of them.

I will tell you how I decided RT Emulators didnt really do anything. I had ridden several bikes with them and every one felt very harsh in the mid range of the fork stroke, and just overall too stiff on the damping. At the first Unadilla vintage race in 2012 I borrowed Craig Hayes' '82 250WR for the cross country race. I raced the bike to a 2nd overall. After the race, he asked me how I liked the suspension and I said "It was fine". I weigh 150lbs and Craig is at least 350lbs, so I thought he was asking if it was too stiff, then he said "Its got Emulators in the forks". After thinking about it, those forks, which were the only forks I had ever ridden with Emulators that I did NOT think were worse than stock forks, were absolutely nothing special and if fact felt just like stock Husky forks. I decided then the best Emulators would do is get you back to stock performance, and that was after Craig spend months dialing in the pop off spring rate a pre-load ending up FAR off the settings Race Tech recommends. If the best you can out of Emulators get is what Craig got, then most people end up with far worse than stock. This is the bike.

545148_3760299800411_1649136800_n.jpg
 
Don't mean to hijack your thread Kelly...

My experience with Gold Valves (insert your own slang term) is limited to 2 bikes and 83 XC250 and an 84 AE500.

Each time I gave my suspension to a reputable suspension guru. He did work for the Husky importer in Australia years ago, tunes a lot of peoples suspension in Australia and has travelled the world tuning suspension for people but mainly superbike teams.

The 250 just had a service as the springs were already correct, the 500 needed springs and a service.

I believe you can notice the difference pushing on the forks and when riding, but just my opinion. 83 - 84 vintage forks are pretty basic tools standard.

My specification for set up was 'I need to be able to hit sh#t at speed' and I weigh 'x'.

I get the front forks and rear shocks serviced at the same time - it makes a hell of a difference to have a balanced motorbike. expensive yes, but you get what you pay for.

Now technically I haven't done a true test of the emulators by themselves, so they could be a placebo, the mind is a powerful tool (the argument could go both ways) but I doubt it.

A bad set up with or without emulators is still a bad setup.

Carby
My AE500 runs a 38mm Mikuni standard and is set up to the original Paul Rooney settings to keep the beast cool (rich). Kelly i'm sure you're a whiz at setting up carbys; but you may not want it to be crisp in the mid-range to help keep control of the beast :)
 
WayneL said:
Don't mean to hijack your thread Kelly...
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Not at all man, post away. :thumbsup:

WayneL said:
Carby
My AE500 runs a 38mm Mikuni standard and is set up to the original Paul Rooney settings to keep the beast cool (rich). Kelly i'm sure you're a whiz at setting up carbys; but you may not want it to be crisp in the mid-range to help keep control of the beast :)
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Maybe I should say clean all the way through. Right now it is a blubbering pig in the middle. Also runs on some. Starts great, idles perfect, good clean hard pulling low end. Then you hit the mid (which on most bikes is still the low end :>) and it just gargles along. Its not horrible but its not good. Then hits the top end and the afterburners are peeked and it rips. I just want one smooth transition. I have seen this condition on many old big bore air cooled bikes. My old CR480 and YZ 465 I got dialed pretty good but had a little of it. I;m thinking the Lectron with its one linear fuel circuit (metering rod) might smooth this way out as is does with smaller modern bikes. I also like the idea of the quick adjust top end circuit on the Lectron for dunes days. Can hardly wait to try it.
 
I agree the mind is a powerful thing, that is why the incident at Unadilla convinced me. I had no idea the bike had Emulators in it, so I had no preconceived idea of how good or bad it should have worked. I thought it was a stock Husky fork, and thats exactly what it felt like to me. If I had got off the bike thinking it was superior to what I was expecting, and then he told me it had Emulators, then I would have come to the opposite conclusion, that they work great.
 
Motosportz said:
Maybe I should say clean all the way through. Right now it is a blubbering pig in the middle. Also runs on some. Starts great, idles perfect, good clean hard pulling low end. Then you hit the mid (which on most bikes is still the low end :>) and it just gargles along. Its not horrible but its not good. Then hits the top end and the afterburners are peeked and it rips. I just want one smooth transition. I have seen this condition on many old big bore air cooled bikes. My old CR480 and YZ 465 I got dialed pretty good but had a little of it. I;m thinking the Lectron with its one linear fuel circuit (metering rod) might smooth this way out as is does with smaller modern bikes. I also like the idea of the quick adjust top end circuit on the Lectron for dunes days. Can hardly wait to try it.
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It will for sure clean up that mid range blubber, thats what Lectron carbs do best on these old bikes.
 
Enduros in Australia use to be Around 80klm (50 miles) between fuel stops, which they managed easily.
 
apparently replacing the old forks with the last evo forks is a big improvement. you can run a disc as well.

If you want to be pre 85 legal, you can grind off the disc mounts and weld back in the rib to give that old slider look...
 
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