Choosing a 610 Discussion

Project Husqvarna TE610 Part 1: Dual Sport Adventure Bike Options

By Dan Barnes

Buying a semi-obscure Italian motorcycle and riding it out to the middle of nowhere may not seem to be a well-thought-out plan, but really, there was some thought. I swear. An off-road bike is ridiculous fun, but it's also kind of like having a track car that needs a trailer. The goal of this project is a bike that can be ridden out of the driveway, cruise on the freeway to get to the mountains, then hit dirt roads, jeep trails and singletrack, stringing them together with a patch of pavement here or there if needed. A go anywhere, do anything bike.

I am a big guy and usually get the call when a friend has something heavy to move. This bike needed to be big, with plenty of power, but not heavy. I wanted it to look like a motorcycle, not a garden tractor or, worse, a garden tractor wrapped in Tupperware®. And it needed to be good enough off-road to climb obstacles and thread through trees on singletrack. Not a low-buck touring bike with sorta-long-travel suspension. A dirt bike. And it needed to have benefitted from a few years of depreciation. The list gets short really quickly.


Honda's XR650R was built from 2000 to 2007, originally with one purpose: to win Baja. And it did win, every time it was fielded in a factory effort. Photo courtesy American Honda Motor Co., Inc.


The XR650R is a great bike: lightweight for a thumper over 600cc, powerful and fast. It looks right. The fact that it's kick-start only doesn't bother me, but some people strongly prefer a "magic button". One could still buy new XR650Rs several years after their model years, but their hanging around in dealerships may have been due to the lack of electric start and the impossibility of registering one for street use in California after January 2004.

Because it was conceived as a race bike, Honda never made the XRR meet federal emissions requirements for road use, and California is one of a growing number of states that choose to enforce those rules. There are 2002-and-older XR650Rs in California with valid license plates, but if you didn't own the bike before the cutoff to convert it to road use in 2004, even buying one with a current plate seems to leave you liable to eventually receive a nastygram from Sacramento, inviting you to trade your now-useless piece of stamped aluminum for an OHV sticker.

It can be debated whether there are strategies for getting around this, but after reading everything I could find about the issue, I decided not to take the risk. In spite of that reality, it seems that most XRRs have had the equipment installed to make them street-legal where that's possible: lighting, horn, etc. If you are strong enough to not worry about kick-starting a big thumper and live in a state that will give you a plate for pretty much anything with two wheels, lights and a horn, an XRR is a solid choice.




KTM's EXC series is among the best options for a dirt bike-with-a-plate, but its high-performance focus leads to compromises that make it less suited for long distance adventures. Photo courtesy Mathis P. and KTM


KTM has both the 530 EXC, which is a fairly conventional dirt bike, and the 690 Enduro R, which is shifted a little more toward dual-purpose work as well as being reorganized from standard motorcycle architecture, with the fuel tank under the seat. New or nearly so, they both cost more than I was prepared to spend for a toy.

The older 525 EXC is another good bike, but neither it nor the 530 have the long legs and ranginess I wanted for the highway parts of longer rides. A tiny engine oil capacity causes the oil to run hot, necessitating frequent changes. Valves need to be checked frequently, though they at least have threaded adjusters instead of shims.



Photo courtesy American Suzuki Photo courtesy Kawasaki Motors Corp., U.S.A.

The Suzuki DR650SE and Kawasaki KLR 650 make good long-distance touring bikes for dirt roads, but are just too heavy for the dirt I plan to ride. Kawasaki also made the much more dirt-oriented KLX650 from 1993-1996 in kick- and electric-start versions, but sold about 12 of them and then stopped. People who have them say they are great bikes, but the newest one is now 15 years old and there is virtually no aftermarket support.

The Honda XR650L is lighter and more off-road oriented. It differs from the DR650 and KLR650 in the range of aftermarket support available to put it on a diet and make more power, but I didn't really want to take on that magnitude of re-engineering. Photo courtesy American Honda Motor Co., Inc.

Also, motorcycles are as much about emotion as function and none of the last three bikes are really sexy to look at. Generally reliable and affordable, certainly, but when you get up close, you don't think high performance machinery.




The Suzuki DR-Z400S is extremely popular and lighter than the other bikes mentioned. However, it still weighs as much as some machines with larger engines, without making the power. Photo courtesy American Suzuki


Aprilias, Husabergs and other exotics have ardent if microscopic followings, but they just feel too far removed from the KISS principle.

That process of elimination leaves just one choice: the Husqvarna TE610. In case you know the Husqvarna brand only by its chain saws or sewing machines, add "On Any Sunday" to your Netflix queue ASAP. After a ten-year-old Jeff Ward wheelies through the opening, much of the movie consists of Malcolm Smith kicking butt in the dirt on Husqvarnas. His friend Steve McQueen often tags along and puts in a not-too-shabby showing of his own.

The Swedish company sold its motorcycle business to Cagiva in 1987, which in turn sold it to BMW in 2007, which opened a new headquarters for Husqvarna in Varese in 2009. At this year's motorcycle shows, BMW management has declared its plan to do with Husky what it did with MINI: make it cool.




Project Husky hasn't seen much dirt yet, because it still doesn't have armor installed and is just too clean to beat up without it. Even though it's five years old, we've been shaking it down and finishing break-in miles.


Though the design roots of the TE610's engine and tubular chromoly backbone frame go back well into the 1990s, for most purposes, TE610 production can be considered to start in 2006. That's when the TE and its supermotard sister, the SM610, were launched in the U.S. market with a substantial makeover, including fresh styling and a catalytic converter to meet emissions requirements. The 2006 TE610 is officially 308 lb, ready to ride but without fuel, which is close to what an XR650R would likely weigh with electric start and dual-sport equipment.

The Husky 610 engine was designed before the Yamaha YZ400F started winning races and every product team entrusted with a new four-stroke dirt bike decided that just because they can compete with two-strokes, they should. Comparing their specific outputs to that of, say, an AP1 S2000, it's not just the power per cc that challenges the new-generation four strokes. I believe it's a combination of typically much greater duty cycle and the lightening required to achieve the power to weight ratio of the engine itself that makes them maintenance pigs.

In contrast, the Husky is big and understressed, and carries plenty of oil. It's 576cc and about 52hp stock – as a four-cylinder, it would be a 208-hp 2.3L. As a result, it can travel a useful distance between oil changes and valve adjustments.

The TE610's fuel tank holds a little less than 3.5 gallons, which is better than most dirt bikes even with aftermarket "desert tanks", if less than most touring bikes. There are aftermarket options for 5 and 6.6 gallons. The Husky has a wide-ratio, six-speed transmission that lets it go slow enough for careful trail riding in first, but also cruise comfortably at 80mph and easily top 100. It has a Brembo-supplied brake system that feels a lot better than some other dirt bike brakes. The forks are modern, 45mm upside-down units from Marzocchi giving 300mm of travel, and the shock is from Sachs, with 320mm wheel travel.

The TE610 has legit passenger accommodation (if you want it - our passenger foot pegs were already removed in the photo above) and a more solid outline of a luggage rack than either of the big Hondas. Its electrical system is rated for 230W, which will run upgraded lighting, an iPod and GPS or two, plus some electrically heated gear if that matters. Getting parts isn't as simple as for a mainstream brand, but it doesn't take any more commitment than doing things right on most car projects.


Here's a basic rundown of significant changes to the TE610 by year:

2006 – model launched with blue and yellow plastics
2007 – changed to red and white plastics with BNG – "Bold New Graphics"
2008 – added EFI, eliminated compression adjusters in forks
2009 – rims changed from silver to black
2010 – no production

A new model, the TE630, was launched in 2011 and is similar mechanically to the TE610. The chassis itself is little changed, but the plastics were redesigned and the engine has a few more cc and a new cylinder head. It doesn't seem clear to anyone outside the company whether the exhaust system with dual silencers was necessary to meet noise and emissions regulations, or if some executive just thought its resemblance to BMW's rotund touring bikes looked good. The TE630 was discontinued in the U.S. for 2012, but remains available in other markets.

The later TE610 forks can be easily upgraded to adjustable compression damping by installing the valves from earlier models, so the only meaningful difference between TE610 years is whether the bike has a carburetor or fuel injection. One Husky expert I spoke with insists that the EFI bikes are less troublesome than carbed models. However, the failure modes of a carb can be addressed with simple tools in the outback, so I'm more comfortable with it.

That's not just me channeling your grandfather –EFI on these and many other dirt bikes still has a lot more issues than we're used to in cars. The carburetor is a Keihin FCR, almost universally used on four-stroke dirt bikes, so jets and parts are competitively priced and available pretty much anywhere dirt bikes and dirt bike accessories are sold. Gravity is a very reliable and inexpensive fuel pump, and a carbed TE610 can be bump started with a totally failed battery.

The TE610 was never a really expensive bike to begin with. Lots of owners regard the bikes as special enough to command a premium, but there are definitely deals out there. If you prefer to buy new with a warranty, there may still be some new 610s or 630s hanging around dealerships – and if you find one, it's a buyer's market.

The hardest part of buying used seems to be actually finding one close to you in decent condition. A few TE610s were bought new and then hardly ridden (common with almost all dirt bikes), but a lot of them were used the same way I plan to: riding to the dirty end of heck and back. When their owners are finally ready to move on, the bikes are thrashed.

The pavement-oriented SM610 is fundamentally the same bike, except it has different colored plastics and pavement-oriented suspension, brakes, wheels and tires. Depending where you live, it may be easier to find an SM610, but the consensus is that it's easier to make a TE610 work on pavement than to make an SM610 work off-road. The SM610 can be an awesome motorcycle, but its peer group is completely different than the bikes surveyed here.




A nationwide Craigslist search, cashing in some frequent flier miles and experiencing my first ever Whitecastle sliders (In-N-Out kills them) led to a bike in the back of this U-Haul.

I found a garage-lurking 2006 TE610 with ridiculously low miles - not even to the end of the manual's recommended break-in. Ridden mostly on farm roads and fields without rocks, there were no scratches on the engine cradle part of the frame. Some Husky fans say blue and yellow is faster than red and white, which would be a bonus. That may not actually be true, but I still dig the traditional Swedish colors. Next time, we'll start on the checks and fixes that should be done to get the bike ready to ride off into the boonies.
 

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