Hello, my name is Steve, and I have a question.
I am not a unicyclist, and I do not imagine that I will leave any further threads than this one.
I tried unicycling in the past, and it did not work out for a variety of reasons. However, I am now very interested in a “unicycle-like” object that some of you may be familiar with, the Coker Wheelman. The penny-farthing like bike. I saw one at Unicycle.com, but I could not find any web community out there with people who may have tried one.
Have any of you unicyclists ever ridden one of these?
Is it easy to ride?
If one can ride a bike, is it possible to just hop on one of these and ride around on it, or is there a period of time of extended learning and practicing, as in the unicycle?
My apologies for bursting in on your forums with this question from a non-unicyclist.
I have ridden real penny farthings. Riding them at a steady speed is very easy. Sudden stops, and dismounting can be slightly tricky. The Wheelman has only a 36 inch wheel (real penny farthings are typically 56 inchesor more) so it should be easier and safer.
I owned one of those for a couple of years, until I reluctantly sold it a while back because I needed the money. It’s much more a bicycle than a unicycle, and if you can ride a bike, you should have no problem; handling the Wheelman will just feel kind of weird for a few minutes, and the mounting/dismounting technique is a bit awkward at first. Ride around an empty parking lot for fifteen minutes and you’ll probably have it down. The attached .zip contains one file, a bare-bones .html page from way back when I was briefly into writing reviews of things (“Tide Rapid Action Laundry Detergent Tablets” being a typical subject, so you can see how much time I had on my hands then). I thought it better to attach it than to paste the entire lengthy text in here, though I can do that if you can’t read it for any reason. The ultra-condensed summary of it is that the Wheelman, at least as it was a few years ago, is a fun, clever design with some componentry issues.
Hey Weeble, when riding the Wheelman, how hard is it to just stand up or lean forward and go into unicycling mode? From the picture, it looks like it would be easy enough to do while standing (like during a climb), but tougher to do it from seated position. Interested in your observations…
PS: Nice Quisp avatar. Not that many folks left on this forum will remember when it was first introduced, but I was chowing down Saturday morning bowls of that stuff within its first month on the market. Tried Quake too, which was a Captain Crunch knock-off. Quisp was better. But the battle between Quisp (the alien) and Quake (a miner dude) really reflected the zeitgeist of the time…the space race had begun, technology was the focus, and the mining towns of Appalachia were starting their terminal slide.
The Wheelman’s center of gravity is farther behind the front hub than it is on a more authentic giant-wheel ordinary, but it still wouldn’t be too difficult to go over the front wheel, if you shifted yourself forward and put the brake on.
I guess the skill might be similar to riding a regular bicycle on its rear wheel. Or maybe not. I’ve never done either, myself.
The av is a clip from an image that I found while googling for something entirely unrelated. I forget now what it was that I was actually looking for. If you want to see the original picture, here is the home page of the site…
Go through “Tick Tock Toys” to “Cereal Boxes” and click the Quisp link in the Quaker section. There are two images of the box linked on that page; the “Unicycle inside” link shows the back of the box, with a better view of the unicycle thing, and the other one next to it on the same line shows the front.
There’s an old Trix box on the General Mills page that puzzles me a little. The link is to “Kid on Unicycle,” but what the Trix-juggling kid is riding looks a lot more like an eggbeater, which makes not a great deal of sense.
As kids we weren’t fed the super-sweet cereals very often, Mom’s view being that foods whose primary ingredient was sugar were more properly classified as dessert than as breakfast. It didn’t matter much I guess, since we heaped the table sugar onto our Wheaties and Grape-Nuts and Cheerios anyway. I’m sure we must have gotten Quisp at least once, but I have no memory of it. My understanding is that Quisp and Quake were virtually identical in flavor, and that both were suspiciously similar to Cap’n Crunch. I hadn’t heard of - or perhaps had forgotten about - Quangaroos, apparently the third sibling in this odd little brood, until I came across that site.
No recollection of Quangaroos…that must not have lasted long, as there was not a sugared cereal of the late 60s early 70s that I was not familiar with.
Quisp and Quake may have tasted similar, but they had different textures. Quake was solid and crunch like Capn Crunch. Quisp had some element of air injected into it…was puffier and lighter. Tasted different to me, but what the hey I was a stupid kid. Quisp probably tasted better 'cause I liked the little alien guy.
Just use a unicycle hub. “Real” penny-farthings didn’t have freewheels. Plus, the unicycle hub will allow you to do real easy track stands (balancing in place), ride backwards and, most importantly, ride it on the front wheel like an early unicycle!
If the Coker wheelman has a freewheel hub, that pretty much kills it as far as riding on the front wheel is concerned.
Forget freewheel, get the schlumpf hub. There’s nothing like pushing a machine to speeds far above those it was ever intended to achieve, it becomes really quite sketchy and frightening. I think anyone who tried this un-holy creation at unicon will agree.
