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 The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.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

Wheel weights and balancing

vintageveloce

vintageveloce

Husqvarna
AA Class
Just put new tires on the TE250. Being new to dirt bikes I wasn't sure whether people balance dirt whels or not. There certainly were not any weights on the stock wheels.

The shop checked them for me. They said (correctly) that it was about 2.5oz on the front and 4.5oz on the rear. With the giant steel wheel weights they had he couldn't do it, it would have been far too many (18 on the rear!).

I considered this and while I wouldn't use the shops weights I have to believe this massive imbalance makes a difference,especially in the desert at 60 or on the highway for a dual sport! IF you are going 15 mph with muddy tires I'd guess it doesn't matter, but thats not my kind of riding.

I also found someone who said Rim locks typically weigh around 3 oz on the front and 4 oz on the rear. That was about my situation. Some guys say they just put two rim locks on, opposite each other, to solve the problem. But my tires were already mounted, and I hesitate to make it harder to change the tires.

I also read that you could balance just the rim and put the weights inside the wheel, but again it was too late for that.

At any rate, I did it the old school way, I bought some heavy solid solder. I've balanced street wheels at home before and just did it on my Harbor Freight stand. Looks clean but it is a lot of solder! Pics attached for your amusement:


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P1030338.JPG

 
The problem with using wound solder is that when you need alot of weight, the winds get so far from the rim that much of the weight has little effect on the balance.
I couldn't find any suitable weights either for DS tires, so I made some up from bar stock in various weights. This one is about 1 1/2 oz.:
photo-11.jpg
 
Thats a nice piece! Great stuff if you have the skills amd tools. And I was concerned about the radius effect you mention.
There are some similar spoke weights to yours on eBay now. I may try that eventually. But Im likely to put some lead ones under the rim strip and tube next time I change tires.
 
I went to Cycle Gear and the guy there just gave me some of their unused spoke weights, they do not use them anymore, they use the stick on. Two 1 oz weights and the front wheel is sweet at 70mph. Also note, I aligned the tire mark on the D606 on the single rimlock.

WheelBalanced.jpg
 
Cycle Gear hooked me up too on my 510. Gave me a several strips of stick on weights. Those things stayed on through thick and thin.
 
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