Pretty much. The Schlumpf shift buttons screw onto the center of the axle and are secured by a tiny allen set screw. There is a thin threaded shift rod through the square tapered axle itself, which is activated laterally by hitting the shift buttons on either side.
As long as the crank arm has the standard hole to fit a screw-on crank remover, the shift buttons, which fit in the same area, should also fit. The buttons sit about half-in, half-out of the crank.
Newer versions of the Schlumpf supposedly shift crisper (i.e. less free play).
I don’t know that a geared wheel with longer cranks is really faster than an ungeared wheel with short cranks and a fast rider.
The thing with a geared 36er is that you can ride a good speed with a relaxed cadence vs. spinning your butt off. It’s sort of a spinning vs. mashing thing.
With a geared 36er, you have to get more muscle into the cranks, which is harder to do than on a bicycle where you have more leverage. If you think about it, 54 gear inches (36*1.5) is still a relatively low gear for a bike. I think unicycles lend themselves more to a faster cadance
Also, regarding big geared wheels vs. small geared wheels, I find that the larger wheels are much more stable (as Greg also mentioned) Geared unicycles are “twitchy” and require a fast reaction time. The smaller the wheel, the twitchier they are.
So it’s better to get used to a good 36 than a geared uni. That is what I thought, and I am getting different length cranks that I switch on the trails. It would be a lot of fun to try it out a geared uni though.
I’ll have to wait till my next few paychecks:(
The schlumpf is lots of fun, but accelerates so fast and stops so quick due to the weight and the gearing that I would use a good fixed 36" if I was doing more than 30 miles as it’s more work to keep a constant stedy speed with the schlumpf. I do know you can get it as a 36" and the new Nimbus 36" frame has the screw holes for the arm that comes off the gearing as roger owns one and designs the nimbus. I would of though that it would cost around £950-£1050 as the 29" schlumpf is around £890 and the nimbus frame is £70, and you also need to get spoke made as the hub is wider than normal, and they need to be stronger. hope that helps
p.s. if there are lots of hills on you ride though, the schlumpf really comes in to its own!! I love it when i come down a big hill and smoothly drop down a gear for a big up hill! that’s when it all seem worth wile! 
Pete
Unfortunately the maths isn’t that simple, 29" rim + tyre+ tube = £60 maybe? 36" rim + tyre+ tube = £165 by my reckoning. Also buying the parts seperately costs more, it comes out at a bit above £1050
Mmm, what you guys say makes sense but I am still interested in seeing what a small wheel with heavy gears would do, yes it would be harder to ride but isn’t that just getting used to? A lot of people say riding a coker with 80mm cranks is insane but they’ve never tried it, for me 100mm was just a little step down from 114, and 90mm was just a little step down from the 100’s, and 80 was just a wee step down from 90’s, I could probably go smaller but eventually you just hit a barrier and I think the future for ‘road’ riding is gears.
Mscalisi, you say riders with a high cadence might be able to beat geared riders, we sure did at Unicon haha but on a more flat terrain I think that geared unicycles would win over, I have a max cadence of just above 200RPM downhill and 150RPM for a long period of time on flat, for me the next step is not improving my RPM to let’s say 160, but for me the step is to see how to better spend that energy, if you look at the world hour record for bicyclists their RPM has always been between 100 and 110, if you look at what my RPM was at my hour record it was above 150RPM and Patrick Schmid’s attempt was even worse, maybe someone wants to calculate it, 27.18km on a 36" wheel with 114mm cranks I believe, Ken please correct me if I’m wrong, I think he used the 102’s on the marathon and 114mm on the record attempt but I can’t be sure.
I agree that the jury is still out, and it will be interesting to see the results as more strong riders have access to geared wheels. I will say this: In Laos, I was on a standard 36" and when Gilby put the juice on his geared 29er, I could not keep up. Then again, he may have been able to drop me using a non-geared cycle.
Still, putting power into your stroke on a unicycle is hard. On a bike, you have clipless pedals and handle bars as things to help you muscle your cycle (yes, we have handles, but it’s not quite the same).
But that race at Unicon was almost flat - it just had a couple of little uphills and one downhill, not all that steep. I know Holland is different, but we don’t have any rides around here that are that flat. I think that rides like Ride the Lobster will be much more hilly. To me, that is the real world of unicycling.
However if special flat-terrain unicycle races are ever done (or more attempts on time records), of course geared uni should be able to win.
—Nathan
Wow, that’s a long sentence, got your breath back yet?
I used 110’s for the Marathon and mostly 102’s (but also 110’s) for the 24hr Record. I’ve not tried 80mm cranks on a Coker but 102mm is much faster than 110’s for flat terrain. Once you throw in a hill or two, then 110’s are faster.
I think my 29’er Schlumpf is faster on the flat then my Coker. It’s probably about the same or slightly faster on undulating terrain also. I have a time trial that I ride from my place to the sea 34km return trip. The fastest I’ve done it is about 1hr30 on my Coker. Fastest on the 29’er Schlumpf was also about the same, except I wasn’t trying as hard.
For the Unicon Marathon, I used the Coker because it was easier to descend with (I haven’t been able to ride fast downhill since breaking my leg). Also, gears didn’t make that much difference on that particular course because you would have stayed in high gear the whole way. So it’s more a case of picking your gear- 36" or 43.5"
Ken
LiveWire Unicycles is basically in the hold stage for all operations, including continued development of the Outta Phaze setup. I’ve worked a huge amount on it and have enough ideas to last a few years at least, so I’m not giving up. However, many physical and financial circumstances have changed in the past year and a half and, for now, I’m not able to continue work on it, or even on any other unicycle or wheel building. Customers that have put down deposits will receive refunds as I’m able to provide them. Then, if I can get the development going again, we can start over from scratch as desired.
I’m continually amazed at Pete’s super pioneering work and I suspect that you’ll see more of it in the future.
Thanks for mentioning me and LWU – I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this distributed co-development with you guys!
Yeah I think geared unicycles really own on flat courses. On the last day of SINZ across the very flat Canterbury Plains I couldn’t keep up with Hans on his Schlumpf 36", even with 110mm cranks on my Coker.
For the Unicon Marathon, I used Ken’s Schlumpf 29er because I didn’t bring a road unicycle of my own! It was a pretty good course for a Schlumpf and I only shifted to low gear once.
It occurs to me that whilst you guys totally owned me on the hilly days, several times that flat day I was riding along behind Hans and whilst it wasn’t super easy to keep up, it wasn’t impossible, and I was sure as hell less fit than you. So maybe you have a point here.
Catching up with him, after he got a head start off the rest stop and I wanted to get photos of all the riders was super hard work though.
Joe
So I went on schulfp’s website… its all in german… can anyone tell me the price for the hub 
thx
THIS SHOULD BE THE ENGLISH VERSION. Look for the ENGLISH/DEUTSCH toggle button in the upper left hand corner of the pages. I think he prices a frame, hub, and cranks together, not the hub itself.
To all, please don’t overlook the fact that it is (probably exponentially) harder to ride ANY unicycle at faster speeds. A geared wheel will have you going faster than you think, relative to a given cadence, but the greater focus needed is from the ground speed itself, not the fact that a guni is geared.
Also, it would help the world if opinions on crank lengths for gunis are based on actual experiences. The concept of shorter cranks on a direct drive wheel is well-known to many. But few riders have yet been able to experiment with crank lengths on gunis, and a reliable consensus has yet to be established. As with bikes, riders’ ideal cadences vary somewhat. We have a way to go before we can say that a crank length of x is generally accepted as optimal for an effective gear ratio (i.e. overall virtual wheel diameter) of y, for a wheel size of z. I only state this because a shorter crank on a guni yields MUCH less control than on a direct drive wheel.
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?