Is there a Unicycle made to coast like a bike, where you don’t have to take your feet off the pedals?
If so…
Where can I buy it?
How much is it?
-Thanks
-Joe
Re: Coasting
Yes, and this is it! >>>
Joe, for a unicycle to coast like a bike, it needs to have a freewheel hub.
With a freewheel hub, however, you can’t pedal backwards (well, you can, but with no response from the wheel) and you can’t idle or ride backwards.
I guess you could wheelwalk backwards, though.
I don’t think you can buy a Unibike, but you can make one with a hacksaw and your mountain bike.
Just cut off the fork below the bottom headtube bearing, and adjust the angle of the saddle.
Oh, yeah, and remove the front brake lever from the handlebar.
Oh, wait… maybe you can buy a unicycle with a freewheel hub.
Unicycle.com was selling Coker Monster Cruiser Bike wheels with freewheel hubs.
If you managed to adapt the freewheel hub with a unicycle axle… you could have a freewheeling Coker.
A Coasting Coker. A Coker-Coaster. A Coakster. One scary ride!
Re: Coasting
There have been one or two (maybe more) unicycles at the conventions (NAUCC and UNICON) made with coaster hubs. I don’t know if any of them had a brake that engages when you backpedal or not? They’re home made unicycles, but I’m sure someone could make you one if you really wanted one. Maybe Tom Miller at the Unicycle Factory has made one before.
From watching people try to ride them they are very difficult to ride. I only saw people attempt on a smooth level gym floor. It’s apparently easier to ride a coaster uni like that up a slight hill than it is to ride it on a level gym floor. I didn’t see very many successful rides on the coaster uni, and the successful ones were very short.
I think Possum Girl, Sara C.'s, coaster uni brakes with back pedaling.
Re: Re: Coasting
The vertical balance might be easier to control when pedaling uphill, but the steering is much more stable when going downhill or coasting (axle being in front of the rider). You’ve probably noticed less steering difficulty when Uni’ing downhills. After learning to coast (with lever brakes or coaster brakes) the steering is much easier. Similarly, motorcycle wheelies are easier to steer while behind the balance point, but on level ground at slow speeds, a gyroscopic front wheel (driven by an electric motor) is necessary for precise steering control. The weight of a motorcycle makes this balance problem much more obvious than that of a unicycle or mountain b*ke. My motorcycle wheelie distance (at slow speeds) was limited by the life of the battery operating the front wheel motor (12.5 miles), but the gyroscopic wheel made it possible to wheelie around motocross tracks (which was great fun). At high speeds, the wind can be used (by tilting the front wheel) to fine tune the steering, but the distance is then limited by the police. They don’t like 120mph wheelies; I don’t like jail. We have reached a compromise. I confine my one wheeling to mountain bikes, unicycles, and the unibike, and they pretty much leave me alone.
Yes, it sure did.
Re: Re: Coasting
Here’s maybe a better option. Unicycle.com sells the Coker Wheelman
http://www.unicycle.com/shopping/shopexd.asp?id=439
Coker’s version of the Penny-Farthing with a free-wheeling hub. Either you could learn to uni on the Coker penny-farthing like the old P/F riders did, or I wonder if Coker or Unicycle.com would consider putting the free-wheeling hub into a Coker uni or other uni?
Worth a question, I think I’ll ask…
Bruce
Re: Coasting
On Fri, 10 Jan 2003 23:38:39 -0600, unibiker
<unibiker.h2u9n@timelimit.unicyclist.com> wrote:
>My motorcycle wheelie
>distance (at slow speeds) was limited by the life of the battery
>operating the front wheel motor (12.5 miles), but the gyroscopic wheel
>made it possible to wheelie around motocross tracks (which was great
>fun). At high speeds, the wind can be used (by tilting the front wheel)
>to fine tune the steering, but the distance is then limited by the
>police. They don’t like 120mph wheelies
Wow unibiker, you are truely a wheelie devil! Do I understand
correctly that if a motorbiker does a wheelie from moderate speed, he
uses the “remaining” rotation of the front wheel for steering? So, is
that what limits max wheelie distance?
Klaas Bil
The average length of film titles in English is 17 letters.
Re: Coasting
On Fri, 10 Jan 2003 21:28:06 -0600, gluteous maximus
<gluteous.maximus.h2o8z@timelimit.unicyclist.com> wrote:
>With a freewheel hub, however, you can’t pedal backwards (well, you
>-can-, but with no response from the wheel) and you can’t idle or ride
>backwards.
In addition, riding forward is very difficult too, with a freewheel
hub. In normal riding, you control forward-backward balance by
slightly varying forward and backward pressure. A freewheel uni will
be easier on an uphill as on flat, as John Childs mentioned, because
there you maintain forward-backward balance by varying the forward
pressure, there is no need for backward pressure as the hill takes
care of that. Of course the freewheel hub would have it’s raison
d’etre on downhills - but it would be very difficult. (I have no
experience with freewheel unis though.)
Klaas Bil
The average length of film titles in English is 17 letters.
Re: Re: Coasting
Klaas,
The wheel rotation has a large effect on the sideways stability and steering (when you have 400+ lbs balanced on one wheel). As the front wheel slows to a stop, the sideways stability disappears, unless you have gained enough speed for the wind to help out. When the front wheel is spinning at 40 or 50 mph, a slight turn of the handlebars will cause a turn in the opposite direction. This is due to the turning resistance, as you have with a gyroscope. Combined with body lean, this allows for sharp turns or tight circles, and provides enough stability to slow to a stop and take off again without dropping the front wheel. Without a front wheel motor, the same effect can be attained (for a minute or so) by lofting the front wheel at high speed and then slowing down by braking while behind the balance point. This is how I got the stability for the no-handed wheelies shown in my photo album. I didn’t have a motorized front wheel on that bike.
This is not a limiting factor for the distance records. These rides are usually done on a large street bike at a large race course where a high speed can be maintained. This makes it possible to wheelie until you’re tired of it, or until you run out of gas. I don’t know what the current record is, but it’s well over a hundred miles.
Coasting Uni w/ Handbrake
Hey Everyone!!
This is Sara Chastain, “Possum Girl”…there were a couple paragraphs about the Coasting Unicycle that my dad and I invented and built in On One Wheel. I had it at NAUCC 1999, a Washington State Record’s day or to, and NAUCC 2002 and UNICON 2002. My coaster is quite difficult to ride because it has a quite small (12"-16") wheel. I actually stumbled across the wheel at a Thrift Store–it was on either a cheap Japanese/Taiwanese bicycle or tricycle. I used the wheelset, cranks, and very little pedals with a 20" unicycle frame that looks like a CyclePro frame. The wheel has a freewheel hub with a coaster brake. When you pedal backwards, the brake is put on.
I am currently experimenting with putting a hand-brake on the coaster and hooking it up to a curved frame with 1 or 2 training wheels. This might help the uni to be more controlled, stable, and RIDABLE. I believe that it is clear that this type of unicycle will never be able to be used for practical purposes.
I am also trying to rig a self-shifting hub to a unicycle hub. I think me and my dad showed this to Greg Harper at either UNICON or NAUCC 2002, along with some other variously-geared hubs with some pretty funky gear ratios. It does not have separate sprockets like most bikes, it is a single circular disc about 7 or 8 inches in diameter which has little mini (1-inch diameter) “sprockets”. There are about 6 of these mini sprockets which form a circular-shape and automatically “fly out” using centrifugal force when going up or down a hill and shifting appropriately to the degree of the incline or decline. If anyone has any information, ideas, or photos on bikes with self-shifting hubs or shifting unicycles, please post it or drop me an e-mail. Greg, have you tried to built a unicycle hub with multiple gears yet? or anyone else??
Thanx!!
~Sara Chastain (unicyclerider@hotmail.com) )–O :)
I think that eventually coasting uni’s will take over all forms of uni and pave the way for dirt jumping. (though I havent ridden1)
I don’t think they will. To make a coasting uni easy enough so that most people could ride it you’d need handlebars, at which point you might as well just have a bike and have the added safety of a front wheel.
Joe
Re: Coasting
On Thu, 16 Oct 2003 16:17:20 -0500, unipsychogirl
<unipsychogirl.veuwt@timelimit.unicyclist.com> wrote:
>There are about 6 of these mini
>sprockets which form a circular-shape and automatically “fly out” using
>centrifugal force when going up or down a hill and shifting
>appropriately to the degree of the incline or decline.
Sounds very interesting. I’m confused though as to what makes the mini
sprockets fly out, is it centrifugal force (which implies wheel
rotational velocity), or is it degree of the incline or decline? You
mention both. In practice the two are related but I am just curious as
to what principle is used.
If it is centrufugal force (which I presume) and the sprockets fly out
against some spring, then is the effective diameter stable when force
is applied?
Klaas Bil - Newsgroup Addict
Grizzly bear droppings have bells in them and smell like pepper spray. - UniBrier
Not sure-I’ll have to ask my dad
Klaas Bil-
I think it uses centrifugal force, but am not sure. It might somehow USE centrifugal force AS the hub is experiencing an incline or decline…I’m not sure though, I’m sure you know more about it than me and I’M the one with the item in question…lol. Its just something we found. I’ll have to ask my dad…he knows about the mechanical gearing of it. We have been really busy with other stuff and haven’t gotten much of a chance at all to experiment with it.
Asked my dad
Klaas-
My dad says that the little mini sprockets actually work in a spiral disc that is controlled by starting or stopping the rotation of the disc. Turns out its not self-shifting after all, sorry. But we DO maybe have a system made by Tokiem that may be self-shifting by expanding clunky “gear spokes” mounted on the freewheel area. You can find either of these designs of hubs/cranks on the Internet or in a couple of bicycle mechanics library books. We seem to remember the brand of the spiral crank sprocket setup as a Hedstrom??? but are not sure. Isn’t that a brand of unicycle, though, too??? Ultimately, these hubs all require freewheel systems, like my Coasting unicycle, and would probably all be just as hard to ride as the coaster. We (my dad and I) know the system you’re talking about–used in the centrifugal-force shifting bicycles seen on T.V.
Re: Asked my dad
Sara, can you give some pointers? I tried various search words and combinations in Google but to no avail. A photo or two of the system you have would be nice too.
Klaas Bil
Its a Hagen All-Speed system
Klaas_Bil:
I found the brand name on the system in question. It says it is a “Hagen All-Speed.” It also says “PATS. PEND.” Unfortunately, we aren’t quite able to transfer photos from our little digital camera onto the computer yet, but my dad says he thinks he can find an article about the system somewhere at the library…he says he thinks he remembers reading about this system. I’ll keep ya posted!!
Here, this should help
I did a Google search on the Hagen All-Speed system and here is the link to the results to the search:
Hope this helps, even just a little.
Re: Its a Hagen All-Speed system
Thanks so far. If your dad finds the article I’d be interested to see it somehow. The Google search results that you posted didn’t seem to contain the Hagen thing we’re talking about.
Klaas Bil