has anyone tried putting a bike seat on a uni?
Is it comfortable?
I have. It was really uncomfortable. I suppose it would be better if it was tillted back farther. I have heard of people doing this on cokers.
Scot Cooper has done it on his Coker because he has a handlebar setup that he can lean on. This is where a bike seat may make more sense for unicycling. Without a good handlebar setup though, I wouldn’t want to sit on a bike seat with all my weight.
One of my older unicycles, a Langenberg made for indoor use, came with a beautiful Ideale leather racing saddle from France. This was a high-end bike seat for the time (1982), and I ended up selling it to a road cyclist many years later. That seat was basically torture for unicycling, and terrible for control. And scary for things like wheelwalking! But the German indoor riders of that time were not doing those sorts of things…
Why?
Don’t.
I have a 1959 vintage unicycle with a good quality leather bicycle saddle. It is almost unrideable.
THe though makes my cocanuts hurt…
Some people choose to ride on a bike saddle since it displaces the wight directly onto their hipbones, so that they feel no saddle-soreness. A bike saddle is wird to get used to, since I’m used to having the concave of a unisaddle skoop my butt and my no-no’s a certain way.
How about the other way round? Anyone tried a decent uni saddle on a b*ke?
Ed Mosimann used DH or dirt jumping saddles on his munis. Ed designed and built the Creative Geckos unicycles. His unicycle building side business is gone but the web pages remain so you can look at his designs and creations. Here’s a page that shows two styles of bike saddles that he liked to use: Creative Geckos Suspension Frames
One seat he liked was the Azonic Love Seat
Another was an old seat by Odyssey
It’s something that you can try. The seats aren’t that expensive. The seats worked well for the way Ed and his friends rode. It’s worth a try if you’re curious but there’s a reason that the vast majority of people use unicycle style seats rather than bicycle style seats.
seat
My first unicycle (1961) came with a leather seat like you find on a derailleur bicycle. I didn’t see the U seat show up until the 70s when my sister learned to ride.
Carey
I have a Loyd unicycle I bought on eBay, which might be the same as the one Carey described. It looks like a Schwinn, except with a nasty bicycle seat. I’m pretty sure mine came with the original seat!
When Schwinn bought the design from Loyd in 1967 or so, they invented the “Patented Schwinn Saddle,” which remained unchanged through 1983. It was replaced by the Viscount in 1986 (there were no Schwinns in 1984-5).
Riding on a bike seat can give better support to the “sit bones,” but usually not in the position we sit for unicycling. On a bike you sit in a much more forward leaning position. Sitting up straight on a bike seat is not comfortable, and the small front end gives very lousy control for steering and tricks.
By the same token however, the small front on a bike seat can be an asset on a road unicycle with handlebars, so your legs don’t chafe against it. You don’t need the front part if you have a handle and/or handlebars, and aren’t trying to do fancy tricks.
Speaking of suspension frames, why don’t we see more MUnis with common mountainbike telescopic forks? Or for that matter, Colers with suspension seatposts.
There must be an obvious reason, but I am naive and inexperienced in the ways of the world…
Thanks!
The standard front suspension forks for mountain bikes don’t work well for unicycles. Unicycles put much different forces on the wheel than what the front wheel of a bicycle gets. Unicycle wheels want to flop side to side just like how an ultimate wheel flops from side to side. The harder you pedal the harder the flop force. That makes one side of the fork want to compress and then the other side. MTB forks aren’t designed for that kind of off center load. You get more stiction in the suspension. The fork would need to be way overbuilt to be able to handle the unique unicycling forces and even then you’d end up with a little bit of wheel flop. An overbuilt suspension fork would be so bulky that it would get in the way of actually riding.
Suspension seatposts are a better idea. They don’t have all of the problems of the suspension forks. But seatpost suspensions can’t take the abuse of muni. They aren’t designed to take those kinds of forces. Muni puts a lot of torque on the seatpost that bikes don’t get. The seat gets banged around a lot from UPDs. Then we also pull up and push down on the front of the saddle which translates into nasty forces on a suspension seatpost. You can use a suspension seatpost but they don’t last long under muni use. The telescoping suspension seatposts also tend to be very long to contain all of the suspension parts and movement inside. That means that only very tall people can use such a seatpost.
The designs by Creative Geckos try to get around all those limitations and problems caused by trying to adapt a MTB suspension to a unicycle.
I have a Thudbuster Uni-Pivot suspension on my carbon fiber MUni. That was a great design for us unicyclists, as I imagine it would hold up to unicycling abouse for a very long time. Unfortunately they stopped making them before I got mine, which was in 1999 or so.
Pictures: http://tinyurl.com/763y7
The more recent Thudbusters look pretty burly as well, but I don’t have one myself.
Yes, I’ve had a couple of telescopic suspension posts, but length is always a problem. The cheap one I had from Unicycle.com was great, other than being a tad too long for my needs. It did eventually die, but only after a lot of use. Well worth the price!
The other thing you may not have considered in terms of suspension. No matter what kind of suspension you put on a unicycle, your feet aren’t going to be suspended. You’re just lightening the jolts to your crotch. A noble cause to be sure, but something you can also do by standing up.
The Thudbuster’s are a neat design and get around some of the problems with the telescoping design. But they still wear out or break. David Maxfield broke one, or maybe more, and he doesn’t abuse his equipment. The Thudbuster’s are a neat design but they’d need to be beefed up to better survive muni use and be more reliable.
My favorite suspension is a fat 3" tire and a cushy air seat.