I was wondering recently if you weren’t really interested in buying a coker but you happened to have a giraffe laying around, would it be possible to change the gearing on it and use it for distance riding? it would make sense to me and probably would be just as easy as changing gears on a single speed bike. Any comments?
Yes
You can change the cog and bring up the wheel size to a 36" or close to it, I did it on my 5ft’r but it was nothing like riding my Coker.
Coker speeds 5 or 6 feet in the air feel just a little different?
After a long ride your landing gear might not be ready for that dismount 
Have fun!
Well my giraffe has a 24" from the standard 20". But putting a 29" or higher looks tempting. 
been done.
you can change the lower and upper cogs around, and mess with the chain to get some higher gearing.
It’s a better idea to lower the giraffe to a safer hieght for bailing, and geared giraffes that are short like that are known as penguins. (don’t ask, i dunno why)
i intended to make one of those, but hten i got a coker when my bike-ressurrection attempt failed.
Do a search for skippi (i dunno where he went, but he made one), penguin, or geared giraffe and you’ll get a ton of hits.
I’m think of converting mine into a kangaroo giraffe unicycle.
I don’t think it gets much more dangerous than that, unless you gear it up, but then you’re just begging to get hurt.
Gearing it up wouldn’t really work, because then the bouncing of the wheel/frame/saddle and the cranks would be out of phase (unless the gearing was an integer ratio) whihc would spoil the kangaroo effect.
Cokers are easy to ride at speed not just because of their high gear, but also because they’re very stable due to the rotational inertia of the large and heavy wheel. A geared 20" would lack this, making it difficult to hold speed on long rides. There’s a good reason that despite the fact it would be cheaper than a coker, geared giraffes have never caught on.
Really? Maybe i should make it then.