My experience is different. Sure you’re going faster (in relation to your cadence), but I can ride an ungeared Coker much faster than the speed I was cruising on the geared one in that race. Speed was not the reason for the kind of focus I was having to apply. The major factor there is powering a more sluggish wheel. I think it’s pretty obvious once you’re on the thing.
I can’t question your personal experience John. But for the guni experience in general, the results so far indicate that for any given wheel size, a guni is faster than a direct drive on fairly level ground. It definitely is a different ride, but you’re the first to call it “sluggish”! What size/gear/crank length did you have?
Hills? Whole 'nother question. Large effective wheel diameters, whether gotten by a big direct-drive wheel or a gear ratio, don’t climb well. Kinda like bikes, eh? Hence the preference for direct-drive (i.e. lower gear ratio).
It would of course be interesting to see a downhill race with both direct drives & gunis.
I think by sluggish he was referring to the extra drag and inertia of the gearing system. I also rode a schlumpf 36" in the unicon marathon, in low gear the whole way, and it is harder work than riding a direct drive coker, even though I was on long cranks I could feel the extra effort to accelerate, like riding with a coker steel rim instead of an airfoil (although not to the same extent). The gears inside those hubs may be small but they have to go round at one hell of a rate giving them a high effective rotational inertia.
In low gear, or 1:1, all of the gears are locked together and the only thing the rider would feel is the residual backlash. The rotational inertia added by the hub is quite small in this case. Most of the rotational inertia is stored in the massive tire, tube, and wheel at the relatively large effective radius of those combined components. Even with a heavy hub, the mass at the small effective radius of the hub (actually, the difference between the geared hub mass times its effective radius and the standard hub mass times its effective radius) produces much less rotational inertia than the outer wheel components.
The planet gears spin at about twice the wheel speed when running in 1:1.5 mode. Since these gears are tiny and have tiny radii they add almost no rotational inertia. But because they are tiny they are necessarily bushed and have no bearings so they do introduce a lot of friction.
Yes, god knows how i went quite so wrong, I think I left my brain in the lab, that’s pretty embarassing. Of course in 1:1 the hub gears aren’t doing anything, presumably the feeling of movement in the cranks is from the locking pins moving in their holes, rather than any gear meshing?
It is a good point, the crank length means different things to different people. My geared 36" uni has 165mm cranks, which are crazily long for most people. When geared up the cadence is lower for a certain groundspeed, but my leg is still moving in that 165mm radius circle that it does at lower gear. I think that with practice (which I don’t do enough of since my Guni can either be at university or at home, for transport reasons, and I thought I’d ride it more during holidays so at the moment its staying back in Oxford) I would eventually replace the 165mm cranks with some 140mm ones, and see how that effects the overall feel of the uni.
My thought process was as such: “Its going to be really hard to learn to ride a 36er in 1:1.5 with short cranks, since I have no 36” experience, so do I get short cranks and learn in 1:1, or long cranks and learn in 1:1.5?" Since riding in 1:1.5 is harder than 1:1 due to the problems already mentioned, I thought that learning in 1:1.5, even with an uncomfortably large pedal circle, was better overall. I’ve still not quite got it right however. You have less control and less ability to ‘zone out’ on a geared uni, and until I’m much more comfortable riding one, I won’t be going back on mine without full safety kit.
Loose.
I’ve offered up The Red Menace to our locals for evaluation, and several have tried it out (including Greg). Notwithstanding the fixed-gear limitations, it appears to have less drivetrain friction that a geared hub. On the other hand, while I’ve had the pleasure of riding Greg’s and Florian’s hubs, neither were laced to a 36". But even there I didn’t really feel any significant drivetrain friction. And we have yet to experiment with better lubes for internal-geared hubs (although I believe Florian’s lube is proprietary and there is no approved substitute).
It’s just my hope that riders won’t avoid gunis on account of a feedback of feeling “sluggish”. There are too many designs already out there to dismiss gunis.
Do it Lewis, my coker is now fully pimped out and with 125s, fancy racing them down the greenway over easter?
I’d call the initial acceleration sluggish, but that’s also typical of starting a bike (or any other vehicle) off in a higher-gear
I will be going cross country and then along the west coast (san francisco, bay area, eugene, portland, seattle and parts of washington, etc.) and I would love to meet up with some of the washington unicyclists and maybe go for a ride. It would be interesting to try out your geared 36 if I could, I still think that geared unicycles are definitely the future for long distance riders.
Part of the reason I am going on this trip is to check out some west coast cities to see if I would eventually want to move out there (I don’t really like living in Northern Virginia).
I have been riding more than 3000 km on my geared Schlumpf 36". I love it!
It takes a while to get used to it. After a few 1000 km there is no sluggish feeling any more. The 1 mm slack on the end o the long cranks has no significance to stability. The 1 mm is the thousandth part of the way of the pedal in a second. That is nothing in terms of reaction time.
A loose pedal is a sign of alarm for every unicyclist. On a geared uni you have to be sure, that the crank is not loose, because the slack is not a sign of alarm anymore.
Short cranks are not an option on geared 36" unis. My 170mm cranks are equivalent to 110 mm cranks on a ungeared uni; that is short enough for me. I started with 140 mm cranks (equivalent to 90mm) and was constantly in trouble.
I am not a good unicyclist. I learend to unicycle after I got a uni for my 40th birthday 4 years ago. I am not even level 4, I cannot hop properly. When I could keep up with some of the fast riders on the SINZ tour on the flat, that was only because of the geared machine.
An advantage of the geared machine is, the possibility to shift down on uphills, offroad, traffic, whatsoever. That I was not able to climb all the passes in the SINZ tour but Ken, Tony and Roger did, only shows that distance riding is more about leg muscles and skill than about equipment.
There are some disadvantages to: the Schlumpf hup is too narrow for a proper 36" wheel. With an excellent wheel built and the airfoil rim, the wheel is good enough for road riding. The break works OK.
The hub is a possible point of failure, but I think with the second generation hubs, Florian has made it quite robust and secure.
The geared 36" is not a cheep uni. But it’s my one and only treat. 
Yeah, on that day I was spinning rather fast (I am still not excellent at spinning really fast like Ken) and you were with me the whole way cruising on your schlumpf 29. It seemed that you were a lot more relaxed and were keeping that speed a lot easier than I was. Schlumpfs definitely own on the flats.
From my own experience with Tony’s schlumpf when I went to the grocery store (NEW WORLD order…or brave NEW WORLD) from his house. Im not sure how long of a ride it was but there were a lot of steep ups and downs on the way. It wasn’t hard shifting, but I know that I would have arrived faster on my coker. The schlumpf just felt so slow on the uphills, and kind of sketchy on the downhills, but when I hit flat I was cruising.
Hans Franz speaks the truth, and as another note he looked very comfortable riding his geared 36 on the tour…and even though he had a faster and more dangerous machine he didn’t have any crashes like some people on the tour did 
You are always welcome here and someone in the SARs will be able to set up a ride that you can make. We may have had a low showing for some of our visitors but we’ve certainly never snubbed anybody and are usually out in full force. We also have spare unicycles and spare gear. Let us know when you’re going to be in town. If you’re looking at cities you may be interested in a Coker urban tour.
Yeah, I think maybe 500 miles before I got really relaxed on mine. Dunno how far it’s been now, over 1000 miles for sure. Something like 600 in NZ this last couple of months, plus all the commuting and riding I did in the UK last year. Now it’s pretty relaxing to ride, just like a coker, and on the rare times I ride a coker, that feels a bit weirdy for the first 2 or 3 miles.
Shifting up is still a slight hassle with the 150s, I have to check that there’s no traffic behind, as in a few rare cases it still catches me unawares and pops me off, but 99% of the time it’s fine. There is a bit of a leg shock when you shift up sometimes too, which is hassle if you’re very tired and your knees are aching. Shifting down is oh so easy, I do it at traffic lights all the time so I can idle and not have to hop on the spot (especially when I have a laptop in my bag).
Joe
Thanks.
Yeah, I could do either an urban tour or scenic ride. I am going to try to fit my coker in the vehicle I am taking across country so I might not need to borrow one. I will shoot out some messages when I get closer to taking off from here.
I am really interested in meeting all the “famous” west coast riders. I think there seems to be more long distance riders out west than here on the east coast. There are definitely more geared unicycles out there, and I am eager to try some out as well!
-James
When we were riding in Christchurch I saw that advantage of the Schlumpf. At the long traffic lights I would get tired hopping in one place on my coker and you would just switch gears and idle with ease.
Hans, thanks for your comments, especially about understanding the need for longer cranks on a larger effective wheel diameter. You and I are in the same boat…I learned in my late 40’s. I’m better at building gunis than riding them!
Siafirede (James), we hope you can make a stop in Seattle. We are the capitol of Gunis! Harper, Jeff S., Abram C., and myself each have different forms of gunis. If Irene wouldn’t stash hers in another state, we’d have more. And every now & then we ride “regular” unis too.
Pete
Yeah, I am actually very interested in trying your form of guni. I believe it has the most potential for people who wish to break speed records.