before any one says any thing…i searched this so many times and came with nothing
any ways im am very happy with my torker dx, but i found sif hopping quite hard with the saddle that comes with it …is there any kinda of cheep way i cand mod the saddle so its easier …i dont want 2 buy a new one… but it just seems that the saddle is so bulky its like impossible 2 grip let alone pull up harde enough 2 go very high or go at all
plz help me
warren
first go to home depot buy some hose and cut it longways. Now place that on the edge of the saddle it will make it easier to hold…
NOW…you shouldn’t be pulling on the saddle…when you bounce you should be putting preasure down on the tire so the unicycle bounces up, all you are doing is guiding the unicycle, don’t man handle it. if you find urself man handling it your hand will tire quickly.
John
but i’m a newbie so what do i know…
oh god cry me a river… it’s not the uni that makes it hard…practice and u wont need to change anything…
I don’t agree, you do have to pull on the seat. The height of the hop does not come from the bounce of the uni. That may help to get a few extra inches but the majority of the hop comes from “handling it”.
The seat is like a KH and it is fat. You can take the cover off and cut the foam then staple the cover on again or make some draw string like the fusion seats…or you can just buy a fusion cover.
Uh, so, how’s that work? I don’t have to push down on my tire? All I have to do is stand in front of the ledge and jank on my seat as hard as I can, and I’ll float up? Cool. This sounds the same as trying to lift yourself by pulling on your own shoulder.
All of the energy in the hop comes from the spring-like behaviour of the tire. The only thing you want to be doing with the seat is guide it up. If you’re pulling it, the only thing you’re doing is resisting your legs. Let your legs move up in a nice fluid motion, pulling lightly on your seat to keep your feet on the pedals. The unicycle is virtually weightless when you’re moving upward, so little force is needed to keep your feet on.
im not looking for the easy way out her im just wondering if there was somthing i could 2 to improve my sif hops on this new unicycle i know im going 2 have 2 practice …it comes with the sport
Much of the energy in my hops used to come off the tyre. I couldn’t hop very high at all and had real problems hopping on my road uni or my coker, or anything where you don’t have a high volume tyre. This technique is also pretty limiting if you want to get into trials and/or doing grabs, as you get up onto the crank hang, and then suddenly you can’t hop at all.
Watching the good people hop, it looks like they’re sort of almost jumping off the pedals and holding the unicycle as they go up, so you’re not really pulling on the seat, you’re holding onto it as you jump. It’s obviously not just the tyre spring, as I recently saw someone do a crank grab on a 26"x3" wheel. The tyre isn’t touching the ground yet you still need about a foot of hop height. It comes from the almost jumping off the pedals thing. Changing to do this both improved my hop height and made it much much less effort.
If your hand is hurting, it’s quite likely that you’re pulling up really hard and not pulling your feet up quick enough, so your hand is effectively pulling against your feet. I used to do this and it made my arms ache.
Tyre spring / pre-hopping is an extra thing to help even more. The good people also use body shape to pull up the uni more.
There are some workshops by Kris Holm on hopping here that might help. He’s quite good at it.
http://gallery.unicyclist.com/albums/tipsandtutorials/Kris_Holm_Workshop_Hopping_small.wmv
Joe
What you’re describing is the shifting of your center of gravity. The center of gravity itself however remains in place (even moves down a bit due to that nagging force of gravity). You will notice a high SIF hopper (or any hopper for that matter, but it’s a bit easier to explain with SIF) will crouch to a tiny little ball. The actual energy moving your (shifting) center of gravity is still that force from the squashed wheel however.
This might be a bit hard to understand, maybe someone else has an easier way to explain?
Okay, in the same way as when you jump off the ground, the energy is all from your shoe pushing into the ground that’s true. But in practice, what you’re doing is more like jumping off the pedals, because it doesn’t rely on a squashy tyre, and the pedals are where your feet are attached to the unicycle, so feel wise it’s more like jumping off the pedals. A lot of the energy comes not from the spring like behaviour of the tyre, but from the solid-like behaviour that gives you something to push against, it wouldn’t matter if you had a solid metal tyre, you could still do an alright hop, although obviously less than with a springy tyre.
You can easily demonstrate that tyre squishyness isn’t all you use to do a big hop, by doing a crank grab to rubber on any unicycle. Alternatively, grab a traffic cone, stand on the body, a good trials rider can get a six inch hop or more no problems at all, without any tyre / wheel.
Joe
That’s not what I meant. The hop comes from your legs but you pull up on the seat to do a tuck. I was trying to say that the hop isn’t just a big bounce. I can hop almost as high without a prehop as I can with one (somewhere over 20") so the spring of the tire does help but it is not where all of the energy from the hop comes from.
Dude, he’s 15 - that probably means he has smaller hands. The DX has the KH seat on it, I didn’t even like that seat for seat out and I’m 6’2". It was bulky and hard to manage for me, I can’t imagine it for a smaller guy. Calm down and think.
Dorfman, search for ways to modify a KH seat for trials by cutting down the foam and using a fusion cover. The info is the same for a DX saddle. Tons of people have the same problem you do.
Technically speaking, all the energy of the hop does come from the spring of the tire, but let’s not go there. Now, I can’t static hop myself (Big, long standing problem which I’ve partly overcome by learning to make my prehop in the same place as my original jump), but don’t you spring your tire down as well when doing a static hop?
This topic helped me a lot though, I’ve found the solution to a problem I encountered about a week ago, I’d keep landing on high stuff (+30") but with one of my feet of the pedals. Just slightly more upward pressure on my seat kept my feet on the pedals better. But I still don’t jank on my seat. (Wooh, 31" now. On to the 34", then better gaps, and then better skinnies)
It is not true that all the energy comes from the tire compression. The balls of my feet don’t have pneumatic tires, yet I can still manage to jump off the ground when I’m not on a unicycle. Rollerblades don’t have pneumatic tires, yet Rollerbladers can jump quite high. If you had a unicycle with a non-pneumatic tire, or even a steel rim, you could still jump on it.
The energy for the hop does come from force exerted against the ground, but the tire compression is an effect of that force, not the cause of it.
You exert a force against the ground, equal to F = kx (K being a constant related to the ‘spring’ and x the distance the spring is compressed). Once the force exerting on the tire is equal to k*x, the potential energy in the tire will be released, in the form of kinetic energy upwards.
P.S
I should note that if x = a (a being the width of the tire) F = kx stops being true, F = ma will start to take place at which most of the spring energy is lost. This is because mass is slow, and the force you’re exerting DIRECTLY onto the ground will move you, and the compressed tire upwards, it will probably start to uncompress about a mm off the ground.
im with spencer…just take the cover off and cut down the foam with a rasor or sumthing…thatrs waht i did with my crap kh seat and it worked great.
p.s. by crap kh seat i meant the one that came on my norco with the perm cover. not that the kh is a crap seat.
Yes, some of the energy in a hop is an effect of tire spring, but it is incorrect to say that “all of the energy of the hop comes from the spring of the tire.” In fact I would be quite surprised if spring energy is more than half of the total upwards force.
If you took a pogo stick and hacksawed it off right below the pedals, so there was no spring anymore, just metal on the ground, you could still hop with it. Similarly, when hopping on a unicycle, the primary force is the rider jumping off the pedals and pulling the unicycle with him.
I have seen people doing trials who decided at the last moment to bail out on a gap. They jump off the unicycle without pulling the unicycle with them, therefore gaining no benefit from the tire spring. They are still able to clear the gap.
Well, ofcourse that’s true. In fact, it’d be exactly half of the energy. The pushing against the wheel results in both the tire compressing, and you moving upwards. Action = -reaction. What I’m saying is that you jumping upward will move the wheel downward, moving the wheel downward is compressing the tire, which will move the wheel upward.
I actually never thought of it like that, wonder if there’s anything to gain. When I jump, I just pound the tire really hard.
No, you don’t get it. The action is the force of you pressing against the ground. The tire compression happens because you’re pressing down; the tire compression is not what causes your unicycle to hop up. If that were the case, what happens at the end of your hop? If you do a big gap, a whole lot more energy goes into the compression of the tire when you land than when you take off; so why doesn’t the landing cause a much bigger bounce than the takeoff did?
Once again; if there is no spring action at all, you can still hop. So the spring action of the tire is not the primary force causing the hop.
If you want to get out of physics and into technique, it may be useful to you to think about compressing the tire before you hop. But that has to do with timing more than anything.
i am in no way smart on this subject …heck im the one that asked the question so what do i know …not much …but the little i do know is that i have 2 pull up on the lift handle if im seat in hopping and i assume you still have you pull the unicycle up so i you can bend your knees other wise …wouldnt you just jump off the uni instead? so what tholub is saying is making lot more sence here