w00t! Seat, handlebar, whatever gets the job done. 
Anything to get more than body weight onto the pedals!
I actually pull up very little on my seat. Itās like a bike handlebar to meā¦if I have to stand up off the pedals, it takes my weight.
29er with 125 cranks
The hills of Clermont Florida, I used a nimbus 29er with 125mm. Worked fine but I paid dearly with leg cramps after 17.5 miles of a 35 mile ride. I have a crank that I hamered in and now I canāt take it out. Is there a way without stripping the isis hub?
Unicycle.com sells crank extractors.
http://www.unicycle.com/shopping/shopexd.asp?id=1230
Have you been using one of these tools, but it is still does not come off?
Hill work and cranks
I am a 50 year old new rider. I started 26 Aug 08 I started riding after becoming injured in an ultra marathon ( I tore my planter facious off my heal) since then went from a 20" to a 24, then 26 and now I am riding a coker . I love riding, it has added a lot to my life and at my age, as other things are slowing down, it if fun to get better at something! My goal is to ride the MS 150 mile bike ride on the uni. in June. I needed to put longer cranks on because the shorter ones were too radical for me. I hope to move down to smaller cranks as I become more proficient / confident on the coker. I have been riding @ 6 to 10 miles a day and plan to to longer rides, weather permitting, but need to do more. Any good exercises you folks could suggest? Any one from the western PA area looking for a training partner?
Welcome to the forums 
Start saving up for a KH geared hub and looking for a machinist to grind your bearing surfaces to 42 mm if theyāre 40 now on your 36".
Use every opportunity to increase leg strength. Eg. sit on a Swiss Ball instead of a chair (or just hold a squat) do walking lunges around the office w/ a heavy backpack, do pistol squats while waiting for the copier, etc.
I read about a semipro cyclist did stuff like this to make up for the ridding he couldnāt do because he had to work. After a couple of years he went pro and quit his job and was still able to support his family thanks to his new sponsors.
Edit:I read this story about a guy, US kickboxing champ at the time, who went to this mixed martial arts training gym. There was this big guy holding a squat in a corner w/ a puddle of sweat under him and the guy estimated heād been there for nearly a half hour. When he was leaving nearly 2 hours later that big guy was still holding the squat and the puddle was over 10 ft in diameter.
Iāve only been at it about a year, but I love hillclimbs and have come to notice something that makes a huge difference. There is a āsweet spotā of balance, one that seems much more precise than when riding on flats, and if you can stay in that spot, the level of effort drops significantly. When I lose that little spot and have to fight to regain it, I spend tremendous amounts of wasted energy. I know this sounds obvious (OF COURSE there is a sweet spot, that is what unicycling is about!!) but Iām talking about refining that sweet spot down to a precise millimeter that brings nirvana. When I can hold that spot, it feels like Iām in a granny gear on my mtb. I can relax my legs, take an extra long pause here and there as needed, and pass bikers up 14-18% grades.
The other thing that helps is to LIFT your legs on the upstroke. It makes pedaling more efficient and easier. The ideal would be to do āanklingā and pedal circles like bikers, but with my ability level right now Iām lucky to just do mild pedal circles with an emphasis (especially on hills) on the upstroke lift. Hope this helps the OP.
Measuring Road Grade:
You can use Google Earth to measure the road grade. Use the line measurement tool and set it to feet (or whatever unit the altitude is listed as in your preferences.) Find the road of interest and click the top and the bottom to measure the distance. With each click, measure the altitude (listed at the bottom of the window.) Now subtract the to altitude measurementsāthat gives you your āriseā and the ādistanceā comes from the measuring tool. To get the road grade, just use the formula:
rise/distance * 100 = road grade (percent)
I know a lot of you probably know how to do this measurement, but I am posting this message for those of you who have not worked it out. My guess is that the values are not meaningful for very short distances (< 50 feet) because of the limits of Google Earth data.
I visited Baldwin Road in NZ (using Google Earth :() and did a few measurements:
Full road: 17.9% grade.
Lower half: 11.6% grade
Upper Half: 23% grade
Top 100 feet: 30% grade
Ouch!
Next time you want to tell us that the road or trail you climbed was very steep, use Google Earth to put numbers on it.
I love hillclimbing on my 36er. Based on Aspen Mikeās advice, I started with 170s for major hillclimbs, but as I grew stronger and desired more speed I started messing with the 150 and 125 mm positions. Now I canāt fathom using 170 cranksā¦they seem too long except for Coker Muni. I use 150s with a geared hub now and I can climb anything in Colorado. I donāt use a brake and I think with proper spinning techniques brakes are unnecessary, even on steep grades, unless of course you want to stop. 
150s give me plenty of leverage for slowing down when I am geared up and I kind of like the simplicity of not having a brake.
If I did not have a geared hub Iād probably work toward climbing with shorter cranks. I recommend putting on a multi-position crankset on and experimenting. I often would climb peaks and passes in Colorado in 150s and descend in 125s. Now with my super Guni I just do everything in 150s. Riding geared up for hill climbs has made me a true believer. There is nothing finer than reaching a summit and popping it into that higher gear and pushing the limits on the descent. It has changed my uni experience significantly and I cannot imagine going back to a single speed coker.
By the way, the Mount Evans Hillclimb is the premiere hillclimb race the state. 28 miles of climbing to the highest paved road in North America, topping out at 14,000 feet. I would be great to have a crowd of uni hillclimbers July 18 this year! Put it on your calendars!
By definition, the grade at the peak would be zero. 
Youāve got to have handle
One thing I didnāt see mentioned was the importance of handlebars. Depending on the length of your cranks and size of your wheel you will at some point (probably between 12% and 24% grade) reach a point where it is provably impossible to climb the hill without pulling up on the seat.
If, for sake of argument, you have 6" cranks and a wheel with a radius of 18" (i.e.; a Coker wheel) then when your pedals are horizontal and you have all of your weight on the front pedal you will be in equilibrium with the hill if it is a 1 in 3 grade (1 meter of rise for every 3 meters of road distance). If the hill is any steeper then you will roll backwards even with all of your weight on the forward crank.
And, remember that this point is when you have the maximum leverage. With the pedals vertical you have no leverage, and the average leverage over a full rotation is 2/pi of the maximum (the proof is simple and I have scribbled it in the margin of my web browser). And, the weight of the unicycle is dead weight and makes the leverage worse. Therefore the steepest hill that can be climbed if you apply just your weight to the pedals with 6" cranks on a 36" wheel is somewhat less than a 2/3pi grade or 21%. Shorter cranks means you canāt climb such a steep hill.
Expert riders routinely ignore this restriction, by grabbing on to their seat and pulling up, thus letting them apply forces greater than their own bodyweight to the pedals.
Itās actually pretty amazing ā in order to climb a really steep hill āallā you need to do is a series of one-legged squats while carrying weights and while doing incredibly delicate adjustments so that you can maintain your balance even through the dead-zone where you necessarily decelerate.
A heavy unicycle makes this much trickier. Less than perfect riding skills also complicated it a bit.
starting on a hill
Thanks for all the advise about hill climbing. I canāt quite get it right when trying to start (again) after stopping on a hill. I am new at this and have been working on free mounting the coker and on a good day it takes two to several attempts to get started on the level. but Up hill is a different story I usually after @ 5 min. of trying just push the uni to the top and start again.
Thanks for your help
odometer for the 36 uni / polar bear dip
I want to get an odometer for my 36 inch wheel, any suggestions? I have a cat eye wireless for my fixed gear and wanted to use that but the calibration rations only go up to 700mm.
Thanks , also
any one in the Pittsburgh Area, see you at the Mon wharf 1 Jan 2009 for the polar bear dip. We will be selling T shirts āPolar bears For Bundle upā All the proceeds go to project bundle up - get cold to help a kid stay warm!
Happy New Year!!
Starting on a hill
Starting up-hill is very challenging, with the difficulty increasing swiftly with the steepness of the hill. If you canāt mount uphill then turn around, mount down-hill, and do a quick u-turn. Itās allowed. Or mount across the hill, perhaps from a driveway.
I realized today that the physics is a bit more complicated than I made it sound. The 2/3pi grade calculation assumes that you are applying your full bodyweight to the forward pedal at all times. You can, surprisingly, do better than that. If you effectively ājumpā from one pedal to the other then you can apply several times your body weight to the pedal when it is horizontal, and not waste any body weight when the pedal is near vertical. This averages out to being equivalent to always applying your full weight to a horizontal pedal. This means that the maximum grade that can be climbed without pulling on the seat, assuming a zero-weight unicycle and perfect riding skills, is 33%.
Iād love to hook up force meters to the pedals and the handlebars and see what actually happens when an expert rider climbs a steep hill.
It is much easier to go up a hill by going from side to side. Why bother stressing out the legs and lungs. The first guy I ever saw on a uni went from side to side and by the time he arrived at the top he said he felt fine. ANY hill can be conquered by riding side to side. I think sailors call it tacking!!
I think there might be more energy lost in the act of turning than in just driving straight on up the middle of the sucker. Especially on a Coker-type uni, tacking up into a steep hill and back across to the other diagonal is brutal. As mentioned, if a hill gets steep, you hold on tight and jump hard (i.e. more than your weight) on the uniās front pedal.
I recommend against a wireless computer. They can have signal problems if you ride w/ others they can get their signals crossed and you have to keep the computer really close to the pick-up on the fork leg. Besides you canāt check it on the fly.
Iād get a wrist GPS. MuniAddict has one, ask him where he got it.
I admit to doing the whole tacking thing to get up Baldwin St last year. If I had a better handle I reckon I could have gone straight up.
Iāve also added some climbing tips to the AU website:
http://www.adventureunicyclist.com/?page_id=214
Enjoy!
Ken