my two small wheels get the most action day to day. I leave one at work and practice at lunch. one is a kh20 long neck with moment 137mm cranks and an impact gravity with 140mm groovy cranks. Im not too fond of the gravity cranks. They are too long and I find whatever advantage they give me in surface area to land on, they interfere with regular riding especially when riding out of tricks.
I am currently working on flatland skills, but would also like to continue working on trials , street skills too, so I am thinking of setting one up especially for trials and the other for flatland. How would you set them up and why? The biggest difference is the square vs round frame, so my guess is that the kh is better for flat. If thats the case i can see sticking the 137s on the impact and buying 127s for the kh. Thoughts?
I accept that for whatever reason you don’t like the Groovy cranks, but I find it difficult to believe that you can tell the difference in length. For all practical purposes they are the same length.
Between them I think your reasoning is sound using the KH for flat, and the Gravity for trials.
You are right. I didn’t mean to say I notice a difference between the 137s and 140s. I think both are a bit too long for flat. I don’t like the groovies because of the knobby thing sticking out they hit my ankles. I guess I’m not good enough to know why I would need them. I have yet to purposely land on the cranks. My only flat trick is 180s and I still suck at them
Oh, I got it. I re-read your OP and that makes more sense.
A few years back a bunch of people had the same problems with banging ankles on the crank nubs. I think it was mostly the old 8 spline KH cranks, and the Torker DX cranks. Anyway, the solution at the time was to grind down the nub and replace the crank bolt with a large button head (rounded) bolt. I think it worked because neither of those splines were tapered. I’m pretty sure that if you ground the nub off of “Groovies” it would take away the crank extractor threads, and removal would be difficult (to say the least).
I’d bet that there are people that would be happy to swap 125 moments for your groovies. Then if you ever wanted the nubs back you could just get Rollo Disks.
I used to have tubular K-1 trials cranks that are similar to Groovies. They did feel good for rolls and crank idling and that sort of thing, but that nub tore huge holes in the sides of my shoes. I traded them for Moments. Now I don’t hit the cranks as much, and when I do, it doesn’t blow up my shoes or cut my ankles (although it still hurts like a bitch).
If I were you, I would sell or trade the Impact cranks and get some 125mm Spirits or Moments (if you can find them) with rollos for the KH.
I’ve got an Impact Reagent with Groovy cranks. That being my first trials uni, I thought the zero-offset cranks would be an advantage because my weight would be closer to the midline of the unicycle. It took a while to get used them, so I can now ride without my shoes getting hung on the knob. But I haven’t figured out what else to do with them yet.
I looked at the Eiffel cranks on the UDC website. It says those have zero offset too. The KH Moment cranks are listed as having 10mm offset, which will be better for shoe clearance.
Good point. I am used to riding with cranks with qfactor, including moments and spirits. I much prefer more qfactor, or at least that’s what I am used to.
I have those on the Reagent I bought from UDC over the holidays. I use it for trials, and I like them for that. They’re light, the design seems well thought out, and they’re a pretty sexy piece of bling with the black finish and silver machined areas.
But I think those grooves machined into the cranks where they fit on the spline would make them terrible for flat - it’s almost an anti-rollo disk.
Me too. I don’t have enough experience with different cranks yet. My other uni is a Torker 26 DX which I think has 4 degree offset. (I’m not sure why they did not specify that in millimeters instead.)
I’m doing an experiment - I’ll ride a couple of weeks on the Groovy cranks, then will see what happens when I switch back to the Torker.
I have never done a crank roll, and so this is just from observation. Wouldn’t those cut outs help crank rolls? It’s almost like they would give you grip through the roll instead of having a slippery surface.
So about ready to pull the trigger on new cranks for either the KH or the Impact. The groovies are actually growing on me, but at 140mm I still think they are too long for what I do. They are very choppy when rolling out of tricks.
Also I think they are quite heavy. So thinking of 125 Spirits. Moments seem hard to come by these days, esp. in this size.
Speaking to Amy at UDC yesterday it seems there’s no consensus on whether Spirits are good for flat. Some people love them some people hate them. Anybody have experience with them here? Esp. 125s.
Impact stopped making Groovies, so 130s are hard to come by. Mad4ones are expensive and hard to come by and moments at this point are also hard to come by.
