The earliest evo Husky?

[Michael Moore]

In the 17 Mar 1970 issue of Cycle News there's an article by Russ Darnell on Charles Curnutt.  An interesting photo in it shows a set of experimental 8" travel Curnutt dampers fitted to a 250 Husky.

Seeing that reminded me that the Winter 1971 Motorcycle Sport Quarterly had an article on the Buck Smith/Joe Robert's "Superfork" modification (retaining only the stock sliders) to Triumph forks that gave 8" of travel.

The suspension revolution was already in progress.

cheers,
Michael

[Brian Watson]

Couldn't have been that good.. Husqvarna did not progress with it..

[Michael Moore]

It wasn't a works Husky project, but rather one of Curnutt's test bikes.

cheers,
Michael

[GMC]

Do you have a scan of the article?

[Michael Moore]

Geoff, CN makes it easy to download a page as PDF (a large one though, about 3-4mb) so I've made a point of doing that for anything I see interesting.  I only want to have to look through 15+ years of weekly papers once!  Going through just the first half of 1970 has been a walk down memory lane as I'm recalling a lot of the riders and events just from the photos.

http://www.eurospares.com/graphics/suspension/CN700317Curnutt.pdf

There's some other Curnutt info in that folder if you browse to the folder level:

http://www.eurospares.com/graphics/suspension/

cheers,
Michael

[Scootern29]

Hello Michael,

I haven't spoken with you in a while. I have more Curnutt stuff that I have acquired that has not been posted anywhere on the web or has been seen for many years. I have spoken with Charles recently and he is doing well at the  age of 91 years young.

There is more Curnutt stuff here on Michaels site about a 1/4 of the way down the page.

http://www.eurospares.com/newadd.htm

Scott T

[Scootern29]

Couldn't have been that good.. Husqvarna did not progress with it..

Actually it was very good. Just at that time not many understood the concept. It would be impossible to state that Husqvarna did not progress with it. The reason I say that is Rolf Tibblin (Husky Factory Rider) and Charles were very close friends and still are. I am sure the longer travel Husky mags were related to this early research as Curnutt was forward mounting and experimenting with different stuff early on. You would have had to been there to believe it. When Rolf came over to the US and started racing off road cars and smoking the big boys with a 1200cc VW motor in a buggy, his choice of shocks on the car were.................Curnutts. I witnessed a lot of it in the mid 70's and on.