Hi:
I normally ride a 26" Nimbus Oracle, but I’ve been thinking about getting a small trials/street uni to: a) learn to hop (and maybe a few other skills) and b) take on trips–the 26-er is just too big to get on an airplane. Further, I like to keep a uni in the car, but the Nimbus totally dominates my trunk. I’ve been watching the trading post and craigslist for a long time and nothing has come up, but today I saw these Koxx Fluo’s at http://scooterstoreusa.com/collections/unicycles/products/koxx-fluo-20-trials-unicycle for $200, shipped.
Does anyone know anything about these particular uni’s? I think Koxx closed down a couple of years ago, so I assume these are old stock–could they be fakes?
Any info on the Fluo or thoughts/comments would be appreciated.
I wonder if they are buying them from amazon as amazon still has a few old koxx unicyles left.
It is a steel black devil frame, should be reasonably sturdy.
The hubs may not be true ISIS as I think the original KOXX unicycles weren’t. They look ISIS but don’t fit ISIS cranks on, I’ve had issues with this in the past.
It would be good to know about the ISIS issue, I’d like that to be standard. They sell a lot of bikes at scooterstoreusa: maybe they could check it out for me.
Search the forums and you’ll find plenty of info about the early Koxx ISIS fit problems. You’ll also find that it was fixed years before they went under. The likelihood that any of the older hubs/cranks are on these close out unis is fairly low.
The Koxx unicycles that were sold by third party sites seemed to have lower quality controll than those sold by the main unicycle stores. There might have been a batch of rejected unicycles (frames) that were dumped onto the market…
You could think of it as buying something with slightly higher end parts than a Nimbus trials but with no manufacturer support, the possibility of a slightly misaligned fork and minimal risk of non-standard ISIS, for a bit less than 2/3 the cost.
In my opinion it’s a good deal. To me the money saved is significant enough to offset the risk of some minor issues.
I ordered one of these and its scheduled to arrive on Thursday. I’ll post some pix. Concerning the point of origin, it appears to have been picked up by UPS in Earht City, MO.
So, it came today and it should have been called the Koxx Harlequin: I ordered green, but got a green rim, pink pedals, and a yellow seat post clamp. The fork is quite a bit different than the one pictured and is labeled “Loic Baud Flat Promodel” AND IS ALUMINIUM!. A quick search revealed that such a model may have been offered by Koxx in 2008.
The hub and cranks are labelled ‘K1 reinforced’ and look good. The rim is double walled aluminium and has a tryAll sticker on it
What do you guys think–old stock Koxx or Taiwanese knockoff? Does it matter? BTW: it seems that the price on this has now gone up to $299.
I think pwest is the winner of yesterday! That looks great, a steal at the price like saskatchewanian says.
With all the models of Koxx unicycles on sale at Amazon and elsewhere, my old guess was that someone had picked up the rights to the brand name and started producing them again. After all, Schwinn bikes and unicycles are still sold even though that company ceased to be in 2001. It seemed like there was too much Koxx inventory out there for it to all be left-over new old stock. But yours sure looks like it’s from the day, so maybe there really were that many Koxx unicycles left in warehouses. Could it be that inventory management practices like that had something to do with why Koxx is presently a bankrupt former company?
Take a look at the Where are unicycles manufactured? thread. The authentic ones were made in Taiwan, like all the well-known brands of unicycles are.
From what I read, Asian knockoffs these days are often made on the same production line as the genuine article but aren’t listed in official accounts, and just go out the back door of the shop instead of being shipped to the official distributor. But someone who’d go to the trouble would likely pick a brand like Apple, Nike, or Beats–something lots of people would recognize and want to buy–and maybe not so much a two-years-dead (and not much mourned) unicycle company. I don’t think you need to worry too hard about that.
That’s exactly why old stock one Koxx one is always a bit of a sketchy buy, although you ended up on the good side, some other guy might have ordered an aluminum frame and got a steel one.
Could well be. The whole koxx brand “koxx bikes, koxx one, try all, etc.” all were managed pretty badly. The two German unicycle stores stopped selling koxx-one unicycles after koxx-one started selling unis at lower than wholesale prices on their own k-124 store without warning the stores, effectively leaving them with a lot of unsellable stock. who knows what else went wrong inside that company, but since they had decent products in all departments, something on the business end must have gone wrong.
For sure. I would give some real thought to buying one, even at the new (typo corrected, I would guess) $299 price, if I knew that I would get one just like pwest’s. But there’s no guarantee of that.
I looked back at some of the blogs and news stories from when Koxx announced its bankruptcy a couple of years ago and it didn’t look like there were many tears shed for them.
Ouch! Good luck getting it squared away, seriously. That’s a real drag.
