faired uni

[daino149]

Re: Re: Re: faired uni

Originally posted by joemarshall
[B]I sometimes ride fast enough to get a benefit from a fairing. Or at least I did today. Straight into a 22mph wind that was gusting up to 38mph. I was having to power hard to ride downhills.

Joe [/B]

Yeah, but could you imagine riding a faired uni in a 22mph cross wind? I would be like riding with someone next to you constantly trying to push you over.

[joemarshall]

Re: Re: Re: Re: faired uni

Originally posted by daino149
Yeah, but could you imagine riding a faired uni in a 22mph cross wind? I would be like riding with someone next to you constantly trying to push you over.

Good point. On the coker it was like that already at times.

Joe

[tholub]

I haven’t ridden with a fairing, but I have ridden a 29er with a (decorative) disk wheel (in the Arcata-Ferndale Kinetic Sculpture Race) in significantly windy conditions. It’s manageable. The funny thing is that it usually wasn’t perceptible as a side force; when it was a quartering rear wind, like on the beach, it felt like I was totally being pushed along; I got some serious speed down the bach. In direct side winds or quartering headwinds, I just felt a little out of sync, like I had to keep slowing down to get the unicycle back under me.

I don’t see a fairing being particularly useful, but it would definitely be rideable.

[johnfoss]

Re: Re: faired uni

Originally posted by Klaas Bil
Ha, I wanted to post the picture I once saw (and thought I had saved
but I can’t find it) of a blimp with an undercarriage consisting of a
single wheel and ask “Is this what you mean?”

Blimps look like cool giant unicycles, but unfortunately most of the ones I’ve looked clostly at also have tiny little wheels on the tail fin. Boo.

[Bob22b]

Originally posted by johnfoss
[B]81 mph sounds like the record for non-paced cycling. I think speeds up to 150+ have been managed with motorpacing. Mile-a-minute Murphy did a one-minute mile about 100 years ago (paced). Surely bikes have gone a lot faster since then?

Why use a fairing? I can think of three major reasons:

1. Improved speed

2. To look cool

3. Possibly to keep the rain off

4. Improving speed only works if you’re going pretty fast in the first place. Before messing around with fairings, a geared recumbent unicycle design should be worked out. Got to get the frontal area down first, before a fairing is going to help at all.

5. Yup, there’s always looking cool. Only if you’re fully enclosed, you’d better have a lot of help starting and stopping! Not to mention riding with any kind of wind. More about this below.

6. The purpose of a fairing, per-se, is not to protect you from the weather. A weather-proof unicycle sounds pretty ridiculous. You can use an umbrella to keep the rain off, but you still need something major to keep the backs of your legs from getting soaked and dirty because of all the water you’re picking up and “wobbling” all over yourself. So I’d recommend a rain suit and goggles.

Fairings make bike handling unwieldly. That’s on a bike. Take away one of the wheels, and a little bit of wind will keep you from being able to ride in the direction of your choosing. Even a large wheel unicycle is susceptable to wind. I remember once riding across a giant parking lot at Jones Beach, Long Island, with Ken Fuchs. We were on 40" and 45" wheels, trying to cross this parking lot with a very strong headwind, hitting us at kind of a 45 degree angle. We literally had to tack, like sailboats, to avoid flailing our arms all over the place! [/B]

What’s this non-paced and paced cycling deal?

[brian.slater]

Originally posted by Bob22b
What’s this non-paced and paced cycling deal?

Basically, paced means that something is blocking the virtual wind that you have when you move. Think of a car that has your fairing attached to it instead of you - you don’t have to deal with wind resistance. It’s drafting on steroids. If you’re going 150 MPH then you would still have 0 headwind.

Unpaced is DIY, if you’re going 20 MPH then You’ll have a 20 MPH headwind - assumeing there’s no wind when you’re not moving.