Diet Coker!!!

Unicycles and Equipment
22

I am in envy of you beautyful seat bows down

23

that is an exsepsional sounding machine

24

Wow Ken,

This Diet Coker really does look pretty amazing. My experience of my airfoil coker (I’ve never ridden a steel rimmed coker) is that it barely felt less wieldy than my 29er (although I think I’ll notice it more when I start riding the 29er again). An ultra light coker could be really amazing.

How much difference do you find lighter pedals / cranks make? Although they’re rotating weight, they are pretty close to the centre of the wheel (esp. with short cranks) so I wouldn’t have expected them to “feel” that much different?

How much difference does a CF saddle base make? Can you really feel the weight difference, or is it mainly the extra stiffness that matters?

25

Woooah, if that’s right that’s less than either of the KH munis. That’s super duper light. You’ve saved over 2kg over the stock coker.

Is that the narrow UDC hub for weight saving, or the wider one?

Building up this kind of wheel and stuff is way cheaper now, you can build a fantastic coker for £320 on unicycle.co.uk, with stainless spokes, alloy seatpost and everything (see below). Obviously the super-posh stuff like the expensive carbon seatbases adds on a lot, but it’s way cheaper than it used to be.

36 x Spokes ÂŁ22.68
1 x Unicycle.com Extra-Wi… £32.00
1 x Coker 36" Tyre ÂŁ65.00
1 x Black Alloy Cranks ÂŁ17.00
1 x Inner tube 36" Coker … £13.50
1 x KHE Stimulatorz Pedal… £15.00
1 x Airfoil 36-inch Rim ÂŁ90.00
1 x Kris Holm Fusion Sadd… £29.00
1 x Replacement Unicycle … £28.00
1 x Qu-ax Aluminium Seatp… £8.00

Joe

26

Beautiful ride.

Thanks for such a detailed list, Ken. My Radial is quite heavy and this gives me several suggestions of how/what to upgrade.

27

Ahem! :slight_smile:

28

See attachment for example. This is in no way an ‘I’ve got new toys too’ post.

Mine isn’t quite like that. The flat pedals I got don’t take toe clips, so are going on the muni and have been replaced with cheap cage type pedals. And I saved money by getting a 29er tube rather than a coker tube. I then killed 3 tubes getting the tyre on the rim - bit of a tight fit. Took me a lot longer to get the tyre on properly than it did to build the wheel. The tyre is a radial, not the coker one. It’s the first time I’ve felt a coker tyre seperately from a wheel - they’re not light. Makes you wonder what they’d be like with something like a 36" big apple. We can dream…

And another ‘woo’ for unicycle.uk.com - big random list of bits, and it gets delivered 22 hours after ordering.

IMG_2192a.jpg
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29

Not as much as saving weight on the tube, but still noticeable especially when you’ve dropped over 1/2kg. You could try attaching a heavy crank/pedal set to a non-built up hub and then swinging it round and round. Now do the same with the light set. Now do it at 100+rpm and you get an idea of how much difference it makes.

I don’t think the carbon base is that much lighter than a plastic seat, but I like the stiffness especially when I’m standing up and putting my weight on the handle. More so with a large handle like the GB4.

30

I’ve got the narrow hub on the frame- I like the narrower Q-factor and I had not noticed any flex in the wheel on the old frame. This frame seems to flex slightly more however. It’s no big deal to switch the frame back to the stock, I’ll only add back 250g to it, after having saved well over 1kg.

What’s the KHE Stimulatorz pedal?

For regular riding I would normally prefer the GB4 handle and straight cranks. However, it’s also nice to be able to ride a superlight Coker just to see how much difference it makes. The tubeless kit is the nicest part of my Coker IMHO, and lighter than the tube set-up. Makes a big difference to the quality of the ride.

31

Ok you beat me to it. So how many calories does your Diet Coker have? :stuck_out_tongue:

My Diet Coker can be converted to a Vanilla Coker (for MUni), Lime Coker (for racing). It can be mixed with bourbon to make an alcoholic Coker (for Unitouring).

What can yours do?

32

That is a very nice uni. I have been thinking about getting into cokering cause i like riding around the streets for exercise and for just getting out. and can you explain these air brakes, i havent heard of this before.

33

That’s a beautiful piece of equipment there, Ken. And it’s unbelieveably light at 6kg, although your bathroom scale is not designed to weigh cats. I used a 25 lb full limit scale and had to remove the seat and weigh it separately to get an accurate estimate of a stock Coker with steel rim. My measurement was about 27 pounds or about 12.25 kg. BlueShift weighed in at 15 pounds or about 6.82 kg.

Sounds nimble, though. If you can get the wheel set down that far you can really whip it around quickly. It makes riding skinnies easier. Scott makes fantastic stuff, doesn’t he? That grip of his is unreal.

34

I love my airbrake- it’s soooo light!

I’ve attached a photo of it:

35

I just put my JC Coker on the (digital) bathroom scale and it came to 21.4 lb (9.7 kg). It’s a tank, but less of a tank than a stock Coker.

I haven’t considered weight in choosing the parts for it. I could do many things to lower the weight. I’m back to the stock Coker tube so a 29er tube or a tubeless conversion would lower some weight. I have the TA tire on it which I like. The tire will get lighter as it wears down. I have a Magura brake on it. A steel rail adapter and steel carriage bolts in the seat. I do have an aluminum seatpost. Frame is a steel GB4 and I have no idea how much it weighs.

My JC Coker handle is all aluminum. I haven’t weighed it separately. It is modular and easily removable.

I keep considering a Stans tubeless conversion. My main concern is that it would probably (possibly) burp air when I have to squeeze the tire to fit it between the brake pads every time the wheel is removed or inserted. And I don’t have an air compressor.

The stock Coker tube makes the wheel feel like a slug at times (especially when climbing). I took it for a ride today and looked down at the tire several times to see if the tire was losing air because it felt like such a slug. It felt better when I had the 29er tube.

36

Re: Diet Coker!!!

On Mon, 4 Sep 2006 19:10:28 -0500, GizmoDuck wrote:

>Not as much as saving weight on the tube, but still noticeable
>especially when you’ve dropped over 1/2kg.

I had the same experience this weekend when I tried my non-splined
MUni after having ridden 2.5 years on a KH24. The cotterless hub on
the old MUni is easily 1 kg (over 2 lbs) lighter than the splined KH
hub (according to unicycle.uk.com). And the difference in handling is
VERY noticeable.

Indeed, such ‘hardly rotating’ weight near the hub still does more to
how responsive the unicycle feels than e.g. weight that’s in the
saddle - let alone weight in the rider.

The reason why weight in the rim or tyre is so important is that it
resists acceleration and deceleration of the wheel. A big part of that
is rotational inertia. Granted, a hub does rotate too, but the
rotational inertia is quite small due to the hub being so close to the
axis of rotation. Same with cranks but to a lesser degree.

Now, when you accellerate the wheel e.g for keeping balance, the hub
mass has to undergo linear accelleration, and it will resist that too.
Conversely, the seat does not directly accellerate forward (or not as
much) when you push the wheel forward. On the contrary, when you push
the wheel forward to regain balance, the objective is to bring the
wheel back under the seat so it (the wheel) has to accellerate more.

A long-winded way to say that mass in hub, pedals and cranks is still
an important factor in responsiveness of a unicycle.

Klaas Bil - Newsgroup Addict

“I’m slowly but surely stealing Wales and bringing it back to my house on the wheel, frame and cranks of my muni. - phil”

37

Plastic bmx platforms - apparently you can put metal pins in them to make them okay. They’re quite lightweight. Not as nice as the magnesium ones but way cheaper. Thinking about it though, I’d buy Azonic Fusion pedals not from unicycle.com if I wanted platforms, or some cage pedals like John has if I wanted clips, would add about a fiver to the cost.

Have you compared the weight to your munis, how does it compare to them?

Joe

38

If somebody in Italy built one it could be a Roman Coker :stuck_out_tongue:
(Sorry)

Rob

39

OK, that’s very interesting, and very useful to know.

Exactly. When thinking about the handling of the unicycle I usually focus on the moment of inertia of the wheel (which, to my mind, determines much of the “beastiness” of controlling a 36" :-).

Ooooh, good point. I hadn’t thought of it that way - makes a great deal of sense! I’ve already got alloy cranks on my 36er - guess I might start looking for some lighter weight pedals also.

Handling is particularly important to me since I do a lot of riding around blissfully unaware pedestrian tourists, and because I have dodgy knees and they get less angry with me if I don’t put lots of force through them!

Thanks very much for the explanation, I’ll add that to my mental list of “unicycle physics” :slight_smile:

Cheers,
Mark

–
“I’m slowly but surely stealing Wales and bringing it back to my house on the wheel, frame and cranks of my muni. - phil”
[/QUOTE]

40

Noooooo.

Now I wish people wouldn’t talk about thier unicycles cos it only gets me thinking :wink:

The trouble with buying things that you’ve never had before is that you don’t know what customisation you are going to need until you’ve used it a bit. After having (my first) coker for about 4 months now I have decided 2 things: one - I wanted to ride on 125 cranks, two - I wanted an airfoil rim and for the wheel to be a bit lighter for me to be able to turn the wheel with 125 cranks. In the meantime I had also realised that if I wanted to ride on 125 cranks I would have to get another frame because I would have to raise the short person’s coker frame too far when I put on the shorter cranks.

So this thread has got me thinking. Why not go for a diet coker since I would need a completely new unicycle? Joe’s post was very useful. So I priced a similar set up on udc last night. Now all I have to do is find the money …

Cathy

41

You don’t have to think too much Cathy. Nice as all this ‘super-light-weight’ optemisation can sound, it doesn’t make nearly as much difference as riding lots.

Unless you get obsessive about it and go for every possible component, like Ken’s machine, the factor of improvement will be pretty low.

I recently upgraded my 36er wheel from a stock Quax one to an airfoil-rimmed, stainless spoked one. Possibly the most significant change was the wider hub and carefully tentioned build, giving a tighter wheel. I never thought that it felt ‘soft’ before (over 2500 miles of road use), and hasn’t ever so much as hinted that it may even consider looking into the possibility of beginning the process of the slightest amount of tacoing. I also changed from 114 to 102mm cranks, which may affect the apparent feeling, but it certainly did feel like it turned more deftly and responsively.

So, I felt that the new rim/spokes (though I think I really got it largely due to the old one being increasingly rusty, and the visual appeal of the airfoil) can make sudden sharp turns feel ‘lighter’. But I don’t think it makes it feel much different to ride along. Going up hill on a grim day and it can easily feel just as sluggish as it did in such situations before. After all, it’s only a reduction of (plucking a figure from the air) something like 20% of the wheel’s weight.

(Deadly) Des may be the ultimate advocate of the minimal factor of equipment. He rode his first 24hr Mountain Mayhem race on a standard stock Coker, which had never been off-road before. He says that despite having an airfoil rim currently (I think due to the standard steel not being sold seperately when needing a replacement), he’d be just as happy to go back to a steel rim. He just rides whatever, and is one of the fastest/best at it.

There may be a significant mental placebo effect. If you feel like you have a good, strong, light, fast wheel, you’ll probably feel stronger and ride it faster. If you think that you’re wheel sucks, it will probably seem heavier and slower than it is. May some go-faster stripes is what we all need.

Crank length, on the other hand, can have a huge effect. :slight_smile: A 36" wheel with short (eg 110mm) cranks feels like a completely different creature to one with longer (eg 150mm) ones. And cranks can cost only ÂŁ7/pair.

My tuppence.

Sam