Like Harper, I also spent the weekend in the shop building unicycle hubs (just plain 'ole hubs - not geared). However, mine are MUCH simpler than his so I met with a little more success than he did!
What I’m attempting is to make a simple, strong hub using 3/4" diameter material for the axle. It looks like a Suzue hub with a bigger axle.
It seems that people like to see and hear about this kind of stuff so I’ve created a nested “unicyclist” gallery with pictures of the various stages of fabrication of four hubs. There’s also a photo of cranks with the spider removed.
As some of you might remember, I tried making crank arms that locked onto an axle with keyless hubs but the cranks broke during alpha testing. This project isn’t dead but just on hold. Here’s where the galler is located:
I’ll install these hubs in four of my aluminum frames that should be back from the anodizer next week. Then I’ll see what I’ve got … and will no doublt post some more pictures!
May I just send a .dxf or .iges file to you and let your machine hog out the part for me? You do beautiful work. When you welded the flanges onto the axle, how did you index the spoke holes so that they would stagger (half of the angular hole spacing) correctly?
Send a .dxf and I can import it right into our CAM program. I do this all the time - draw the part in Autocad then save it as a .dxf file for importing into Mastercam. Works really well.
Regarding the flange hole spacing … I welded the first flange on the axle with no reference to anything. Then I turned the axle over in the fixture and inserted a welding rod through a hole in the top flange and put the end between holes on the unwelded bottom flange. then I rotated the axle (and top flange) in the welding fixture until the welding rod lined up, by eye, with the axle.
I didn’t sweat the alignment too much since there’s so much adjusment in the spokes and spoke nipples when the wheel is built.