OK, I was getting tired of my heavy 20" Torker LX for freestyle, so I took an aluminum mountain bike crown, sawed it apart and milled down the width, found a 1 1/8" aluminum steerer tube, and sawed apart an old chrome unistar frame for the legs (to keep the bearing holders, which I wasn’t about to make from scratch…yet). Then I had a friend heliarc the crown halves and seat tube together, and I bolted in and glued the steel legs. Voila! A new, lightweight, custom freestyle frame! I was also able to cut off a standard 7/8" seatpost quite a bit, saving even more weight. I used the same seatpost clamp from the Torker.
$5. for the crown and tube at my local recycled bike shop, and $20. for the chrome donor frame. My and my welder friend’s time, though priceless, shall not count due to the fun of it.
looks awesome! its probably just the picture playing tricks on my mind, but how close is the frame to touching the wheel? anyways, thats one sexy frame you have there.
Thanks for that link, John. I now know that my Picherrad is a “Semipro” model. I got the uni second hand and knew nothing about it except that it was a Picherrad and that its previous owner bought it in Germany. Its cool to find out stuff about your unis!
Check out the walking machine on the “Spezials” page - wery nice!
It looks very nice. And it appears the crown can be separated from the fork legs, like a Pichlerrad? This means you have a modular frame. You can swap out wheels and fork legs to fit different sized wheels. That’s one of the cool things about the Pichler.
There is indeed 1/8" clearance between the tire and the bottom of the crown. However, on this one the legs are epoxied and clamped into the crown. I actually didn’t consider modularity of the legs for a different size wheel; rather, I only wanted to make the crown as small as possible for the hookworm tire.
The bearing holders are just standard Torker/Sun type. I suppose if anyone bothered to machine some aluminum ones for a standard 40mm bearing, with a round plug at the top of the bearing holder to fit into a 7/8" or 1" tube, we could venture into carbon fiber tubes…
This one was fairly easy, to get parts from the used bike shop, and I didn’t use a jig for assembly, just eyeballed it! It rides very true.
The crown/seatube/shorter seatpost combo probably saved at least a full pound over the Torker frame.
The Pichlerrad Solo has lollipop style bearing holders rather than the main cap style. To take the unicycle apart to change the tire you have to remove the crown from the fork legs.
The Pichlerrad Solo is an interesting design. But the design does have it’s faults. It can be a bit tricky getting the legs all square and lined up when putting it back together. It’s still a cool design and every time I see one I go “Ohhhh, I want one”.
