My first uni cost £30 (~$50) from Lidl - about as cheap as you can get. I figured it didn’t matter if I didn’t get into it at that price, and that if I did I would get something better and stop using it. I’ve got myself a 26" muni, but find I’m still using my cheapy 20" plenty when I’m trying to learn stuff.
It’s now creaking a bit, particularly when hopping, which is something I guess it wasn’t designed for, let alone doing more substantial jumps. The question is, is it likely break on me? I’m most concerned about injuring myself when something goes, but I’ve also realised that if it does break I’d want to fix it or replace it with something better, as it’s handy having something little to play about on. I suppose I’d like to be able to do street - though realistically I’ll probably never get the skills to do more than basic stuff.
I’m sure you’ve probably done this already, but my husband has my very used cyclepro cast off and yesterday it was creaking , wiggling badly. He took it home amd discovered just about every nut/bolt was loose. Tightened everything and it sounds good today.
There is a good chance that the creaking you are hearing are the cranks starting to move on the spindle.
For long term durability you can remove the cranks, clean the interface, add some copper grease and re-install setting the crank with a plastic mallet and tightening the bolt/nut.
Or you can pound them on a bit further with a hammer and tighten the crap out of the bolts. That is what I did with my cheep unicycles. I tended to bend the cranks before anything else went wrong with them so the effort of doing it properly would have been wasted.
Our first unicycle was come cheap Toi-Toy from Blokkers (holland) 39 € to start learning. Maybe a better unicacly would have served better.
It didn’t took that long and we figured aout, if we want to start sitting on the saddle for any longer it has to be improved somewhat (we already bought some shoes, with more flexible sole but not to much) so we bought a proper seat and also a 24" luxus from Quax.
Soon the Toi-Toy started creaking, sounded like some of the spokes, so i tightend those (little bit and more even), sound got better, but one spoke broke.
Replaced all the spokes, tihgtend pedals on cranks, no sound but uni was kinda weird to ride now.
So we were looking for another 20" unicycle and i decide that i’d try to change my seatpost back in for the longer version i left behind when i bought the 24".
We ended up with a used 20" Fishbone, orange with red rim, und a 20" Quax Luxus, bright red with yellow tire.
Swapped the pedals, 127mm or so from the Quax to the 150mm or so from the Toi-Toi, now 24" and 20" Quax have 150mm pedals and my girlfriend has a 20" with 127mm and one with 150mm cranks.
And the blue Toi-Toy got a white/bright blue new tire, the original was wasted.
Greetings
Byc
P.S.:And recently i got a 26" Quax muni with Nimbus frame. Last time i was out with the dog i found out that i need a bigger tyre.
Hoppla, looks like i forgot the whole point of the post above while i wrote it.
Well, the real cheap no-name uni has a new saddel, a new seatpost, new spokes, new pedals, new cranks, new tire. So all gettings a better uni in the first place would have been a real good idea.
The fishbone and the Qu-Ax Luxus unis are great, but i’d only use them for indoor riding and paved roads, maybe gravel paths. “Dropping” from sidewalks onto the road should be okay.
The Qu-Ax MUni is the first one i would take XC and the only one i’d do drops and jumps with.
Good question. I consider the core element of a unicycle to be the frame, but if you replace everything else, it’s still hard to call it the same unicycle…
Having said that, it’s easier to keep track of a frame than a hub, rim or other components as they move around the garage.
The hub on my learner bent a lot before it broke I could even see it cracking. The cool thing was about half an hour after I actually broke it, the courier showed up with my brand new KH
Have also done basic off-roading on it.
