Husqvarna is a motorcycle marque that’s always been a little unusual, the company start life all the way back in 1689 as a firearms manufacturer before moving to the Swedish town of Huskvarna in 1757 and taking the same name.
By the late 1800s the company was also producing bicycles and then in 1903 they began buying third-party engines and creating motorcycles – making them one of the oldest motorcycle companies still in operation.
By the time the 1960s rolled around, Husqvarna had largely perfected the art of 2-stroke engineering, this allowed them to dominate the enduro and off-road motorcycle racing right through into the ’70s. Steve McQueen famously loved his Husky as did many other Americans, leading to the company enjoying massive sales successes only rivalled by the larger Japanese motorcycle manufacturers.
Husqvarna still enjoys significant successes on the dirt tracks of Europe and the USA, the company recently began a push into East Asia which resulted in them setting up shop in Bali, just down the road from Deus. This twist of provenance led to the bike you see here – a Husqvarna built for the road rather than the trail.
If you’d like to read the story of how the bike came to be, as well as what went into creating it, you can click here to visit Deus Ex Machina.
Ben Branch has had his work featured on CNN, Popular Mechanics, the official Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with millions of readers around the world and hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
MotoLady is one of the enduring personalities in the world of motorcycles, she created the website TheMotolady.com back in early 2011 and has now become a globally respected motoring journalist and advocate for women on two wheels. This short film by director and founder of Stories of Bike Cam Elkins offers a unique insight into…
The Meirson Sprint Motor (MSM) V-twin Prototype The Meirson Sprint Motor (MSM) V-twin prototype is an engine that you’ve probably never seen before. Just one was made in 1967 by a talented father and son team in Australia; Clarry and Allan Meirs – the name Meirson is a contraction of “Meirs” and “Son”. The two…
The first Porsche tractor designs were penned by Dr Ferdinand Porsche in the early 1930s alongside the early designs for the VW Beetle – the original plan was to develop a “Volks-Tractor” to be sold alongside the “Volks-Wagen”. A Brief History of the Porsche Tractor By 1934 there were three working tractor prototypes, all of which…
This famous photograph by Michel Monteange shows the pit crew of the Gauthier and Schaller team at the 1969 Bol d’Or endurance motorcycle race held at the Autodrome de Linas-Montlhéry just outside of Paris. The most immediately noticeable element in the image is the cigarette hanging from the mouth of the no-nonsense chap in the…
We damn near had no film. The sinking sun gave us a hard out of around 6:10 pm and my watch read 5:30. Months of planning, a lot of money and the sliver of a reputation I had nearly joined the disappearing daylight.
To say that the Greeves Challenger, and all Greeves motorcycles, were ahead of their time is to significantly understate the remarkable foresight of Bert Greeves and his lightweight two-stroke off-road racing motorcycles. Bert developed the first examples of his scrambles and trials machines in 1952, almost 20 years before lightweight two-stroke motorcycles would rise to…
