I’d say mass produced is when large numbers of identical items are made for sale in anticipation of orders being received — as opposed to only being manufactured when a definite order from an individual customer has been received.
My first two unis were Pashley.
The 20 was a UMX: a 20" x 1.75" (from memory) tyre. The lollipop bearings were held in place with short self-tapping screws. They rattled in the fork ends.
The 26 had the improved system with the bolts passing all the way through and being backed with a Nylock nut. These were well enough made and snug enough that there was no rattle or wobble.
Pashley have become a very niche retro manufacturer. The Muni was more modern and advanced than many of their bikes! It was made with Reynold’s tubing (lightweight tubing, but so much of it that it was heavy). The frame had braze on bottle bosses which were not yet standard on reasonable quality bikes. It had cotterless cranks which were still not universal on bikes. It had an aluminium alloy rim, whereas many bikes still had chromed steel. It lasted me well and I had many fine adventures on it.
Here’s a link to the company website:
Pashley are now owned by Moulton. Moulton pioneered good quality small wheeled bikes and back in the 1960s/70s introduced a simple but effective form of suspension. Sadly (in my opinion) Pashley have now gone full on for the retro market, and Moulton are apparently aiming for the rather specialised market of rich people who want to appear different and a bit quirky.
Images below of
The current Pashley Guvnor (super retro expensive gimmick)
A modern Moulton (nicely engineered but a far too fancy expensive gimmick)
A 24" Pashley uni with the cheap lollipop bearings and a crummy saddle
A rare photo of me on my Pashley UMX taken in 1989.
Indeed. Thank you, Gilby, for making this user-friendly home port of the old newsgroup, making it accessible to a much larger audience than existed during the Usenet years.
Before the Unicyclist.com Forums, this was the Usenet newsgroup “rec.sport.unicycling”. By the time Gilby created the Forums and ported the newsgroup over, it had become pretty cumbersome. This was because users would receive all the messages, and there were plenty of users and topics in those days. It could overwhelm your inbox, even if you were uni-obsessed.
Before the “Usenet official status” and rec.sport.unicycling, it was the “unicycle newsgroup”, a simple email mailing list. I can’t remember now who originally started that; it was before I joined. I got connected to the online community in the early-mid 90s, and Beirne Konarski was the administrator of the group. I think he also started the unicycling.org website, which was probably what Pierrox was referring to above. An official IUF website only came along much later. Now it’s replaced the old content at unicycling.org, which used to include things like the “Been There, Done That” page, of unicycling feats and endeavors.
I would credit “The Internet” in general as a very important component in creating our current unicycle environment and market. The fact that we have so many choices of quality unicycles and parts is directly connected to the ability of the Internet to connect people with specialized interests. If you can figure out how to sell unicycles online, you can reach a large enough audience to be able to afford to make new seats, for example, every year. This is huge!
Yup. And it did exist then, but was not nearly as easy to find.
That might be a fair way to define it for the small unicycle market. I don’t think any of the high end unicycles or parts out there are made in very large numbers, rather in batches.
Brett Bymaster, one of the early Muni pioneers, got a Pashley Muni when they were new. He corrected the flat vs. round problem with the bearing bolts with a set of spacers that were curved on one side and flat on the other, which probably helped his Pashley survive as long as it did under his use. He was always trying things that punished a wheel! I may be wrong about the rim being steel on the Muni.
I found a scan of a photo from the '97 Muni Weekend, where Roger Davies is trying to help Brett tighten his crank bolts. He’s weilding a hammer, and apparently has a non-metric socket that he’s about to whack to get it to fit the crank nut. Or he’s goofing around for the picture, as I realize it’s my hammer and my toolbox off to the side. The cranks appear to be alloy, but I’m not sure if it came with those, or that Brett had swapped them out. his Muni also has a Miyata saddle on it. The rim looks more silver than chrome. And he has some nice, sharp rat trap pedals on it! We all did.
I saw a few of those people on our recent trip around Ireland. Isn’t Moulton famous for his folding bikes? I assume the small wheels are part of the overall design of a bike that’s designed to be compact for travel on bus, train or plane.
Was that uni really called UMX? Was that the official model name? That was what we called offroad (or rough terrain) unicycling before around 1995, when people in England started calling it Muni. The UMX title came from an article I did for the USA Newsletter in 1981. I called it that because at the time, BMX was at a height of popularity, before mountain biking had become huge. We never really did do anything like moto-type racing with unicycles that I know of, but we called it UMX before the “MUni” name came into regular use.
Here’s that Muni Weekend 1997 phot. Brett Bymaster is wearing his “Bloodman” shirt, and Roger is wearing the Muni Weekend shirt, which I think was the first Mountain unicycling T-shirt ever made. At left is Roger’s carbon fiber Muni, and you can see the seat and post of my jerry-rigged 26" Schwinn “Muni”, with its Chinese knock-off red Miyata-ish saddle.
That was the second California Mountain Unicycle Weekend (we didn’t do T-shirts for the first one). Several people attended that as their very first uni convention: Bruce Bundy, Nathan Hoover, Dan Heaton, Beirne Konarski, John Childs, Scot Cooper. Where was George Peck? He came in '96, and again in '98 when we had another new guy, Kris Holm.
Moulton’s big thing was the small wheels: small wheels and a novel suspension. Yes, they have always had at least one folding bike in their range, but that is not their core product.
You may be thinking of Brompton, who make one of the best designed quality folding commuters, or possibly Bickerton. The Brompton is one of the most successful and iconic folding designs, beloved of trendy commuters. The Bickerton was a thing of its time, and dreadfully ugly.
Yes, my Pashley was officially called the “UMX” just as they officially called their 26 the “Muni”. These days we’d call that “cultural appropriation” and start a Twitter storm.
I remember the brochure saying choose the 24 for speed or the UMX if you wanted to “go unicycle yomping”. Yomping was a buzzword at the time as it was used by the soldiers who fought in the Falklands conflict to describe a rapid advance over rough terrain.
Attached:
[LIST=1]
Picture of Brompton folding bike, folded.
Picture of Bickerton.
Picture of me riding the Pashley UMX at the top of one of the main towers of Warwick Castle.
[/LIST]
I have one on my 28. It’s still my most comfortable saddle, although rather flimsy. It needs a special seat post or I might consider transferring it to one of my other unis.
I remember when this forum seemed to be full of posts about how to convert Miyata saddles to air saddles, but I was always happy with mine.
I think, saddles are really the most game chaning parts for me. The first saddles I used, were as uncomfortable, that I could not ride more than 5 minutes on it. Without better saddles I could not have even imagined to sit on it for more than the typical duration of our performances (3 to 5 mins) or even do multi hour tours on a unicycle.
The old unicycle that Mikefule describes, seems to have been in the same “quality range” as the one I learned on…
The one i learned on, was a 1" steel tube, bend to banana shape and welded onto the seatpost. It was wrapped with an inch of very firm felt and a layer of leather that was sewed on the bottom. So it was around 2 inch thick. The ends - front and back - were open. So I had to sit with my whole weight on the middle line.
The frame had one hole going from the front to the back, the seatpost had several. Then a bolt was put through the holes and secured by a nut. It could not prevent the seatpost from turning a few degrees.
Ah, yes, I never owned one, but I rode one once. Almost a Meccano frame and seat post. Horrible. And the seat on the one I rode was literally hard moulded plastic, and brittle.
They were selling the 20" Muni for about a year before they brought out the 26". Mike, yours is definitely the UMX version. There was quite a cross over with the 2 models.
We have Duncan Castling to thank for the name Muni. He worked with Pashley in persuading them to produce their Muni version.
I do remember they were really fun events that John organised.
My Carbon unicycles were hand made by me and the one in the picture is a Mk4. I produced up to Mk5 including 2 carbon giraffes. There were 29 unicycles of them produced in the end from 20" (I still use my hockey unicycle) up to 26". The problem with them is that they were made for suzue hubs, so were too narrow and with 40mm bearings. So can not fit modern hubs… if they were I would still be riding mine every day.
No one spoke about it, even those currently selling it… It’s a long time I’m struggling between two ideas (buy a Schlumpf or electrify and add PAS to my huni-rex?) and a problem (to respect my wife’s veto!)…
If no one speaks of Schlumpf I can delete it from my wishlist!
I think the single biggest technological innovation that altered the evolution of unicycle engineering was the addition of the front wheel that everyone seems to have lost.
