Electric unicycle -> 20min
Hi,
If you are looking for electric unicycle and some useful tutorials, I would like you to offer our community website with friendly support and some tips how to start ride electric unicycle. That is similar to electric scooters, but only one wheel.
statistics
MrImpossible,
I think your description of the steep learning curve and how people give up is so true. I remember reading a stat that had 1 unicyclist for every 900 people. That’s an exclusive group. The complete opposite of a bicycle where almost everyone can ride. The interesting thing is that almost anyone could learn basic unicycle riding, but because it is so hard in the beginning. . . giving up is a much easier proposition.
I’ve been doing a lot of reading on perseverance and failure, and how the two are intertwined. It’s something called a Growth Mindset – where you understand that continued failure is part of the process…it’s part of the deal and something you should expect. You know you’ll succeed at some point in the future (although you don’t know when), so you just keep going. Typically, people think “that’s too hard”, or “I could never do that”…so they’ve given up before they’ve even started.
This is such a fantastic product! I’m going to get one to go with my electric mountain bike!
I really hope everyone can start using these because why should complete lack of skill limit people from being able to ride? Why should we have to work for something?
I mean, we’ve been doing it all wrong for the last hundred or so years.
I rode 22 miles of muni today, and it was freakin’ hard! I could have just hopped on my electric unicycle and cruised around for a bit, looking like a total poser and wouldn’t have been nearly as tired.
Let me say, I’m glad that you posted some friendly tips on learning to ride it! I was worried it was going to take me as long to learn as an ACTUAL unicycle! F that!
I <3 your electric unicycle!
Oh yeah, for sure. The world is a better place now, I can feel it. We’ll never have to be afraid of the future again. Our old future was poor, cloudy and miserable. Thanks you discovered a new one for us. Everybody should be able to change futures just like socks!
We also invented that one (www.solowheel.com) but the intention was more to get people off ebikes than onto unicycles.
I took mine to our club practice today, the kids loved it. I see it as a reasonable step to learning the impossible wheel and seat drag. It won’t happen immediately but nothing in the uni world ever does.
I think everyone that questioned the oval wheel were non-UW riders. The oval would definitely smooth out the learning curve, which is (supposedly) what this invention is about.
But on an Ultimate Wheel, those two spots are already there; caused by the pedals; with all of your weight on them. The oval-ness is there to smooth that out somewhat.
I think it’s a regular tire. I don’t think a standard bike tire would suffer much with that slight of an oval.
I was thinking the same, especially the part about getting tired out fast due to not being able to sit down. But Machon suggests otherwise, which is very interesting.
Ultimate Wheel riders can. I’m a terrible UW rider, which might even make me better at identifying what’s hard and what’s easier. UWs are hard to ride.
That’s really interesting, and would be fun to do more experiments to see how people learn compared to doing the “the hard way”.
It would be interesting to find out how true that is, if there was a better way to un-steep the learning curve.
I think the Lunicycle is a very clever invention; providing support for UW riding. It still seems like it would wear you out pretty fast because you can’t sit, but if it can teach people how to ride, it could have a big effect on the sport…
I’ve had my lunicycle for two days now. It is definitely not a learners unicycle in the strict sense. It is something different. Maybe a stepping stone to an UW? I can ride it ok and balancing is really not an issue. But my quads feel like I’m starting to learn to ride a unicycle all over again: After thirty yards I’m sweating and my quads are turning to jello. My conclusion: A good workout and it will take me a while to get good at it. If I get really good, I may try a bigger sized UW and mount the lunicycle pedals on it.
http://vimeo.com/121817100
Excellent video Markus. Thanks, makes me want to get one. The inventors promoted to the wrong group of people. Instead of to the non unicyclist, but rather to the guys that already unicycle and wanted to be a UW rider.
HOW in the heck can you convince a non unicyclist to rid of the seat, when the idea of balancing on a wheel and a seat is hard enough…? Duh…wrong target…
I see now, the calf support really helps in stability because you leg wont wobble side to side as much and hit into the wheel, excellent stepping stone…
Forget the 20" , I want it in a 26" then a 36er:D
I finally got my lunicycle a couple weeks back, still looking for time to test it out 
Keep in mind that the shin guard things serve a second purpose - getting your feet closer to the ground. Basically like a “dropper pedal”. I think this might be the biggest benefit to helping first timers learn to uni. The only bad part I’ve noticed so far is, it feels a bit weird jumping off of… like you’re a bit locked into the thing, at least from a beginner’s perspective.
It was a weekend to buy used unicycles, so in addition to upgrading to a 36er I snapped up a “lunicycle” off craigslist after the price dropped. Initial efforts to figure it out on the way home went nowhere, but took it down to spot with a nice long high railing this evening for a try.
And… it’s rideable. Probably quite so, if I regularly rode 20" uni’s, which I really don’t.
But ouch the burning thighs!
It really didn’t take more than a few minutes to figure out how to balance it, what consistently had me throwing in the towel after 25-40 feet was sheer fatigue. In fact it reminded me a lot of my first unicycling experiences two years ago, when I was controlling the wheel with my legs and not yet putting weight on the seat.
I also don’t like the design of the leg braces. They seem to assume that you are going to put your ankle over the pedal… does anyone actually ride like that? Fitting into the calf brace almost requires bending your legs a lot to angle into them, but I still kept popping out and having the curved edge of the brace dig into my leg.
Also, at least for someone without any experience of classic ultimate wheels, the narrow “Q” is disconcerting.
I’ve half a mind to take the tops of the leg braces off, try to bolt some aluminum risers to the rear side of the pedal hangers (so closer to the ankle) and top those with some poly cutting boards (perhaps faced with pieces of camping pad) that would provide sideways stabilization and shield against tiring rubbing, but not try to capture the leg and constrain its angle and position.
And yes, I’m more than a little tempted to try the drop pedals on a normal unicycle wheel and cranks (maybe even a 26") though that would probably cause the opposite Q extreme.
Everything that is wrong with modern society. Find something where a major part of the attraction is that it is difficult, and use equipment to make it easy. Then market it with inaccurate tosh.
It’s not easy.
Someone who already “gets” riding a unicycle may figure out how to make it go relatively quickly, but there’s still the mountain of the required physical exertion.
And for people who don’t already ride unicycles, the challenge has to be a lot higher. Possibly lesser to initial success than a traditional unicycle, but still substantial. The guy I bought it from concluded it was impossible - just as most craigslist sellers of conventional starter unicycles probably have.
That is a fair criticism. Though as schemes on kickstarter and similar sites go, this one falls closer than average to truth.
Looking at it another way, if a a traditional unicycle were a new-to-the-world invention introduced on a crowd funding site, and the campaign had clips of trials, freestyle, and muni, would it seem any less ambitious?
Worst case I put a pair of cheap ordinary pedals on it and have a solid if egg-shaped and challengingly small ultimate wheel to figure out. And one of these days it’s following me to the office, quite a bit more casually than even a 20" would. But I wouldn’t pay full price for it, and I’m glad I waited until the seller dropped his asking price.
But their own marketing blurb says it is easy - or at least easier. They wouldn’t lie to us, surely?
Everyone I know who can ride a conventional uni learned in a few hours. I have never known anyone who put the time in to fail to learn. I have never seen a uni pause at TDC every pedal stroke, and never needed an oval wheel to compensate for that.
It may well be true that it is easier to initial success. To really know we’d have to do a big study and randomly assign volunteers to two groups, monitor their practice time, and follow their results.
The difference is that it’s always going to be more physically taxing than relaxing into a seat.
But time to initial success is what is key for uptake.
You must know a select group of people, and be overlooking many posts by forum members.
I would agree that most people can learn to ride a unicycle if they really want to, but there’s also selection bias there - we generally talk about unicycles with other unicyclists, or with people who “couldn’t imagine that they could ever do that” and so have never really tried.
The lack of torque in that position is widely recognized here and elsewhere.
“Needing” an oval wheel to compensate is a bit of an overstatement - it is an interesting idea, and that of product marketing that isn’t pure hype is made of interesting ideas.
Personally I would have preferred if it were round, in fact I may try substituting the wheel from my 20" to see how it compares.
I’d also prefer if it were a bit larger, maybe 24", I suspect the size was chosen for manufacturing/shipping cost reasons rather than ideal performance. Apart form the oval it seems to have strong heritage to a UDC type ultimate wheel, wouldn’t be surprised if they started by experimenting with the pedal mechanisms on those.
Additionally what may be getting lost here is that I didn’t post to promote this. Rather, I posted because there’d been some curiosity about these, but very little in the way of followup from any conventional unicyclists who had tried one. I was curious, I got one cheap, I tried it, and wrote about it.
Which is why oval and other special shapes of chainwheels become fashionable every few years.
This thread is from quite a while ago. I had seen the lunicycle through my youtube browsings and wondered if it can add on to my UW trainings. They aren’t that expensive and Im considering of buying one, now that I won’t have a 36" UW built for now. Has anyone on here actually bought one by now, beside Engineer on a Unicycle? He describes one of the things I had been wondering about, that after 20-40 metres his legs start to burn. I actually put that as a question to Inventist if they still exist. Because that would be the same problem I currently have with the UW. I think only by training and getting the technique down, will that get less. On Instagram there was a guy in Germany who rode 6kms on a 28" UW and he claimed to be able to ride at least 1km without pause.
Aside from that I am sceptical about the egg-shaped wheel, which probably slows down the rolling. For UW you need a certain speed to keep going or the wheel will flop and with that it will give a good speed I guess.
I think it is cool to add a lunicycle to my collection, but I’d have to experience riding it to really know if I get anything out of it. Also I think learning to ride a unicycle with seat will outmatch this product by far, because you can go so much further and faster and do many more things.
Looks like a cool “better” ultimate wheel. My comments:
1.) Great for a 5-10 minute workout, but that’s it. Try riding your unicycle standing up or full weight on pedal next time. I do that for a warm-up, but not going to keep up with Ed Pratt.
2.) Small wheel = bad rolling inertia. Again a great bouncy workout, not going to reach 1 mile on that thing. Take your unicycle on uneven grassy flat or uphill terrain = same workout.
3.) I would like to ride something like that one day, but I am working on mastering SIF, first.
It’s not a unicycle, you probably won’t keep up with Ed Pratt unless you are on a bike anyway.
It’s a cool idea, I like it, but I like most kind of weird but usable ideas.
If the threads for the foot cradle thing are the same as a standard pedal it would be interesting to try the oval wheel with regular pedals, or the foot cradles on a standard round Ultimate Wheel to see if the oval thing is useful or a gimmick. I haven’t played with different unicycle setups for quite a while now but this shows promise 
