I was practicing one footed idling with my daughter yesterday and didn’t like the way my foot kept slipping off the rounded crown on my trials uni, so I started adapting it by taping a hose fitting to the crown to provide a foot rest. That didn’t work particularly well as the hose fitting had a tendency to rotate to the side, but while it lasted it made idling much easier. From there I cut up a 2x4 and contoured it to roughly approximate what a square crown would be like. Again, I just taped it in place, but this time it was solid enough for me to put serious pressure on it and it’s a big help for the one footed idling.
So now that I’ve proven the concept, I’m thinking I’m going to make a hardwood prototype and eventually mill a two piece removable crown out of aluminum. Has anyone else tried this and if so what do you advise? It also seems to me that I can take this a few steps further and make actual foot rests on the crown if I want, or simply drill and tap a couple holes in either side to make them modular.
i tried to cut little pieces to make a square crown from an impact round crown frame, but could not get it to work. I ended up putting griptape on the crown to help my foot stick better and that worked pretty well
If you’re gonna mill a two piece crown I would suggest not drilling and tapping a frame, especially a nice madforone like that. Instead you could make the aluminum wider than the seat post/heart of frame and drill and tap the blocks at places wider than the frame so that the bolts don’t go through the frame and then still work to clamp the pieces on.
That was my intention. I was thinking of making a clamshell that would lock over the crown with between 1 and 3 bolts and then maybe adding a couple of threaded holes on the top of either side of it. I wouldn’t even think of drilling and tapping the frame. It’s too thin for it.
I may just do that. Aluminum would be stronger, but I doubt I’ll ever reach the point where I’m standing on the crown and for anything short of that hardwood would be adequate and much easier and cheaper to work with.
