2013 Black Friday, Cyber Weekend, and 12 Days Unicycles

There are several threads where available deals are being posted and discussed. How about one for talk about and pictures of what we got? And if you bought a new unicycle right before it went on sale, join in anyway. Pretend you got the good price if you want to and we’ll let you slide. :slight_smile:

I got the Impact 20" Reagent with the KH wheelset from Unicycle.com and it got here yesterday. The wheel with the Moment hub and 47 mm rim was the hook for me. First reaction: Man that’s a black unicycle! Grey center section of the tire tread, silver spoke nipples, white markings on the seat post, all black otherwise. The wheel was in the frame already so assembly was as easy as could be: Put the seat and post in the frame, screw on the pedals, and pump up the tire. The Onza Sticky Fingers tire is 20 x 2.4" and there’s plenty of room left in the frame. Inflated diameter is under 20 1/2", smaller than I expected. I guess the wide rim flattens it out. The frame could easily take another centimeter of width and height if there’s such a tire.

The Impact is actually slightly heavier than my 20" Avenir, I guess from being burlier everywhere, despite being mostly aluminum where the Avenir is all steel. The extra half inch of crank length versus the Avenir makes a difference but not night and day. I did really notice the lower tire pressure I can get away with running in the Onza. Even with the knobs it was plenty nimble turning in tight quarters in the driveway, but I wonder if I’ll ever lean it over far enough to use the soft part of the dual compound tread. The stock post at max height is good with the 137 mm cranks but I also bought a 400 mm post for it that I’ll need when I try 125s on it. Saddle is a KH Street and it works, whatever. I get the feeling saddle finickiness is more of a skinny person thing.

The Avenir has served me way beyond the call of duty but it was getting to where I constantly thought about how close I might be to its breaking point. The Impact should be a good step forward. I took a couple of pictures but my phone apparently didn’t know what to do with the dim grey light today. Or else I’m just bad at photography, maybe more likely the latter. I’ll try again later.

I want to buy one of those sooo bad. But I really don’t need one so I haven’t.

I bet that the weight difference is heavily related to the tire. But I don’t know how heavy a sticky fingers is.

Just regarding them as piles of parts, it was pretty easy to justify. It’s been fun treating these things like Lego sets and swapping the pieces around into new configurations, so the wheel might end up somewhere else and same for some of the other bits. I figured I was getting the seat, cranks, tire, etc for $25 or so each once I’d attached a reasonable value to the wheel, which isn’t sold separately (that I know of) anyway.

Looks like it’s 900 g give or take, depending on which web page you trust. That’s lighter than a Creepy Crawler but yes, maybe 300 g heavier than the (non-original) tire on the Avenir, which is way more than the difference between the two unicycles.

And that wasn’t meant as complaint or criticism, just a point of comparison. I checked them on my fish scale and the Avenir is 10 lbs 12 oz while the Reagent is 10 lb 13 oz. That’s impressive to me given how much bigger everything is on the Reagent. And I’d be happy to put a bigger, wider, heavier tire on it if there is/was such a thing, now that I know there’s room for it.

I’ve been playing on my regent that I got on this sale, and it’s pretty awesome. It feels significantly more responsive than my KH20 and still can’t really figure out why. It just feels “bouncier”.

I love the Naomi saddle.

The pedals are overkill though. They look cool, but they are bit much for flatland. Already bashed my ankle on them and they are tearing up my armor. Gonna get some more twisted pcs.

white reagent with groovy cranks arrived

assembled it and pumped up the tire. The bearings dont seem as smooth as my other unicycles(nimbus), but still gets close to 10 revs before stopping.
There is a slight whirring noise thought…and that’s not present in my other 4 hubs…
It took a lot of tightening of the clamp to get the seatpost tight, but it seems to work fine. Is this fine?

There are two spots on the hub where paint flaked off, approx 1mmx1mm.
A bit disappointed in that…I guess it doesnt matter :frowning: except i worry the paint might come off other places soon then?

The wheel is not very true, maybe 1-2mm side-side and roundness.
The whiskers on the tire rub against the frame…but that’s okay.
I’ve only used plastic pedals so far…so I will probably put some plastic ones on to replace the impact knockout pedals.

The qu-ax seatpost has stem sticking out of the base a bit…bothers me… Do I need to file it down?

ah, time limit for edit over…but just realized,
the hub flange on the impact, seems much more vertical/perpendicular to axis than my nimbus hubs…and the spokes and spoke heads, relative to flange look funny…one side is touching, other side has gap…this may be the cause of one of the paint bits coming off. :thinking:

I grabbed that great deal they had on the Qu-Ax 24" muni. It wasn’t for me though – I had it shipped to the buddy that got me into unicycling in the first place. I’m hoping that the Qu-Ax will draw him into muni the way my own 24 did for me. If all goes as planned, I’ll no longer be the worst muni rider I know! :slight_smile:

qu-ax-24.png

Are you sure the bearing holders on that impact are tightened correctly? That could have something to do with the difference in bearing feel.

i loosened it so quite a bit…at first it was only doing 5 revs wen i had it tightened to approx. same torque as I would for my other unis.
it IS harder to tell, b/c it is some sort of nylock nut

Great pictures! I’d love more shots of the Groovy cranks. They look very cool from what I’ve seen. Yeah, I’d swap out the pedals too. They’d probably be great for heavy duty muni but painful for learning tricks, or destructive to protective gear at least.

Most of the things you mentioned I wouldn’t worry about. Maybe someone with more experience will recognize symptoms of a problem if there is one. I’ve seen where sealed bearings have loosened up and smoothed out after use, so maybe those will free up and quiet down when you’ve ridden it some. And it’ll get more paint chips if you ride it a lot, and I hope you do and it does. Touching up those spots would make it easy to tell if any more paint flakes off if you need an excuse to do it, but it isn’t going to rust.

I wonder about having to tighten the seatpost clamp so much though. Are there two different seatposts in those pictures? There is the issue of some Reagent frames taking 27.2 mm posts and others (like mine) using 25.4 mm posts, even though the outside of the tube is the same diameter and they use the same clamp. Do you know which version of the frame you have? Is there a chance that one of the posts is too small for it?

Good luck with your nefarious scheme! :slight_smile: That’ll be a great purchase if it gets you a muni riding partner, and a dudely thing to do no matter what.

thanks largeeddie and schmolagin
glad to hear those little chips will be insignificant later on :slight_smile:
the seatpost is kh and says 27.2mm
there is about .5mm space when i loosen the clamp all the way between the frame and seatpost, and probably ~.1mm between clamp and frame.

Impact rim has some small holes on the side inside, not covered by rim tape…, is this normal and for what purpose are they there? also some rusting on the rim joint.
The cranks are not aligned towards/away from the valvehole.

I havn’t taken off the cranks for pictures/weighing since i don’t want to have to regrease and install them, but took a few more pics as is.

searched and didnt find any…are there 40mm o.d. bearing reagent frames??
the bearing cap goes on very nicely and fits right around the bearing
however, the frame, seems, like i can get the bearing inside perfectly snug :thinking:

OK, if it says it’s 27.2 then you should be good. Maybe it just fits a little looser than what you’re used to?

You also posted a picture of a Qu-Ax seatpost. That’s what got me wondering.

No idea, but you could use a piece of packing tape under the rim strip to cover them if it worries you. But you’ll be running very low pressure in the inner tube.

Not it’s rust since it’s aluminum, but possibly some welding residue–flux or something–that’s discolored the paint/powder coating? It looks like it’s just cosmetic and if I’m reading the photo correctly you won’t even see it with the tire on.

Thanks, very nice! They look great and seem really well made. You’ll be a crank-rolling monster on those. :slight_smile:

Impact Reagent, MUni?

Here’s my new freestyle/flatland machine. Swapped the Onza Sticky Fingers for a CST Operative, but otherwise stock as spec’d by UDC. The tire measures 2.33 on the KH flat rim.

That is beautiful. Very nice.

I need to post a picture of mine, but I’m afraid yours looks nicer.

It is really fun to play around on. My goal for the winter is to learn one foot idling, and then wheel walking. Did you buy the UW from Ergolicious?

My impact with groovy cranks was also a bit out of true, but it seems to have worked itself out. No issues with anything else. Funny, mine came with a KH post.

I moved my addict pedals to my 36er and put the green twisted pcs that were on that on this.

I love the seat. It’s so light and stays out of my way. I wouldn’t want it on a muni or road machine, but for street/trials it’s perfect. Even the groovy cranks are growing on me. I find this uni very responsive and light. Like I said before I prefer it to my KH20, and it cost about half as much.

Jtrops: Be careful riding backwards and/or tightening the pedals! I got the same uni and those Venture2 cranks are already stripped. UDC said they’d replace them, and fortunately I had some Qu-ax lightweight 125s on hand, so I didn’t have to miss any saddle time. Maybe you’re already used to aluminum cranks, but I had never had them before, so I didn’t realize that riding backward could be such a hardware issue, as it never was on my learner uni. This problem is discussed here by lots of knowledgeable people.

Otherwise it’s a great uni. They gave me the longneck frame (27.2mm) I requested. The KH wheelset seems very strong, and the 400mm Nimbus alloy seatpost looks so sturdy and well-made that I almost want to forego trials riding so as not to have to cut it.

On that topic, there seems to be strong disagreement among very experienced unicyclists as to whether it’s feasible to use this (KH20FL) wheelset for trials, but my uninformed opinion is that with the Sticky Fingers 20x2.4 tire, it should be OK for anything I’m likely to attempt in the foreseeable future beyond riding down my usual flight of gentle stairs. Putting a smooth tire on it as you did seems like it might also be a good idea for now. The broader choice of tires is one of the reasons I chose this uni instead of a 19" trials.