The wheel came out true enough that it ‘looked’ fine, however, just so I wasn’t calling Dave Stockton with my sob story, I decided to limp out of the woods. I walked through the technical parts, and rode safely over the straight parts.
I will be spoke wrenching that thing before I take it out again, I tell you what!
As you can see from the video, MUni’ing on a Coker is a hoot! And only good things can be said about a wheel, so far out of it’s area of design, that will spring back into shape to almost ask the rider, ‘What the hell are you doing, idiot? I’m a road unicycle…but I’d hate to see you walk out of here’
I’m using ie6, when I click on a .mov link, it downloads and opens the movie in a little bitty frame in IE. I have two problems here:
I can’t find a way to save the .mov once it’s been downloaded.
I want some way to view the .mov zoomed to a larger size (for .avi files, i have my system setup so they open in media player, not IE. But I’m having no luck finding a way to do this for .mov files and quicktime).
It was true enough to ride out, and it looks fine, I’m just concerned with the strength of it. My crappy spoke truing will last until I get it to Darren’s next.
Re: A LogBridge Too Far (calm down, U-Turn, it’s still true enough)
I agree. People say the wheel is weak, but it can take a surprising amount of off-road torture (for a road wheel).
Is/was your’s a stock wheel?
I saw jugglerobaby taco his stock wheel doing Muni, and it sprang back to about 1/4" from true, BUT, after he had it trued/tightened, it did NOT last - on flat ground it would ‘spontaneously’ untrue in just a few turns. (It was impressive seeing him ride the Coker thru a piece of trail that we watched 8 of 10 bikers carry their rides thru - too bad it cost him his wheel).
Wow! You are Soooo luck to still have a wheel! Amazing!
If it’s still tue then you didn’t exceed the elastic limit anywhere, which means the wheel is still good. You put a severe 1 cycle load on, which has got to take some life off the wheel, however the main deflection was twisting of the rim. Rims rarely (if ever) fail from fatigue, so IMHO you did no significant damage.
Check the hub flanges and around the spoke holes for cracks or bulges. If there are none then the wheel is virtually good as new.
That was SO cool, Brian. Not as cool as Jamie smacking the tree but cool just the same. You are SUCH a good rider to snap your rim back like that so quickly.
Is the weather going to look like that when I get there by the end of January? Are you going to loan me a MUni so I don’t have to lug one through the airport?
Re: Re: A LogBridge Too Far (calm down, U-Turn, it’s still true enough)
What happened in this case was that the rim took a permanent bend. Just an educated guess, but if he took the rim off the wheel and laid it down on a precision flat surface it would probably have had a 1/2" taco shaped deflection. The only way to restore such a wheel is to slack all the spokes and cold set the rim flat and round again (this is best done by actually taking all the spokes out and using a precision flat surface as a reference), then rebuild the wheel as usual. Or just get a new rim and transfer the spokes.
What I suppose happened was that jugglerobaby just had his wheel trued, which means that the spokes pull against the bent rim to make it a nice round shape. Inevitably some of the spokes will be very slack, and when the wheel is ridden these spokes go completely slack and unscrew. If you check the tension on the spokes in such a wheel you’ll find wide variations in alternate spokes.
I tater’d a couple of rear wheels in sprints and crashes and despite endless retruing they wouldn’t hold up to a sprint. I finally figured out what the problem was and got some new rims. Problem solved.
Wow, Brian, that is AWESOME! The rubberman takes uni form. It’s Nathan’s verbal version of that phenomenon that got me started on my year-long project. What a cool, cool video.
Nice riding on the trails. I love the way you’re leaning into the turns. What length cranks are you running?
If jugglerobaby backed off on the tension a little, he’d get his stock Coker back. The tension is a little high for that weak rim, and so the wheel is (more) unstable.
For readers new to this topic, the Strongest Coker wheel (see link below) corrects the problems with the stock Coker wheel that Brian is riding, as well as others. A Strongest Wheel wouldn’t even blink at that log pile.
