Just unpacked mine yesterday. It looks really good, narrower than saddle as mentioned, and the bar-ends offer great adjustability. I don’t feel that the weight is significant at all. It’s much lighter than I expected after reading past forum comments. It’s certainly lighter than the improvised handlebar I’ve been using for a couple of months. Can’t wait to ride with it!
Bill (and any others) Can we get a riding review, please? If it’s good, then I want one in plenty of time before RTL.
Just enquired about getting one shipped to Australia; seems better on paper then the T7 thats for sure.
Eagerly awaiting riding reviews :o
I’m curious to hear how it survives UPDs. There seem to be three places that could move when subjected to those pressures - where it attaches to the seat post and where the handles attach to the pi bar.
Also, any sign of UDC carrying them?
That’s a good thing really - if it moves it’ll stop it breaking.
It does look quite nice, although rather amateur - it’s not really something you couldn’t (and people have) build pretty easily from standard bike bits. But the price is pretty reasonable and it looks much less unwieldy than a T7. I doubt we’ll see any in the UK though unless somebody orders one direct from Coker.
Rob
I’m not sure which I’d rather do - get out an allen wrench every time I UPD or replace the occasional broken handle.
Are you serious?
One difference also is that with the T7 you have the rails and a rail-type seat post for more saddle adjustabilty; so to get the same thing with with the new coker bar you will need to get a rail adaptor to add to your saddle. This might not be practical for some shorter riders as it will reduce the space needed for the coker bar to clamp onto the seatpost.
That’s an advantage not a disadvantage - you remove pointless adjustability, you can use a lighter weight seatpost (or at least way lighter than using a rail adaptor + rail seatpost), and you never have to worry about the rail adaptor breaking or going wrong.
I guess some people like rail seatposts / saddle angle adjustability though.
Joe
Well, we’re not talking a handle a week or a handle a month here. I think I’d be annoyed if I went through more than a handle a year. Maybe you’ve effectively banished UPDs to an extremely rare event, but on any given ride I can’t reject the possibility of a UPD.
It’s annoying enough to UPD but to have to stop everything, loosen some bolts, fidget with getting everything how I like it again, tighten it back up, and maybe do it all over again if I find that it’s off when I get going again … that would drive me crazy.
On the 100K mostly bicycle event I completed in March, I finished 5 minutes ahead of cutoff and my riding partner finished less than a minute before cutoff. I had one crash on that ride and I think another UPD as well. It was my first encounter with “balance fatigue” as I discovered that I needed to be especially conscious of my riding as my body and mind grew tired. Needing to fidget that much more with my gear could have been the difference between an official finish and “pretty good for a unicyclist.”
I wonder how much time the average RTL rider wants to spend adjusting their gear on their portions of the race.
So, in that there doesn’t seem to be an obvious choice that holds for all circumstances, yes I am serious.
Never had a problem with mine; no breaks or anything. Yes, I prefer the addded adjustabilty and I prefer my saddle higher in the front and fallter on the back. The ony other way to get that angle is by getting a Gb4 seatpost, that will angle the saddle back a bit; but it’s not adjustable. Plus, with the coler handle being substantailly lighter than the T7, adding the rail adaptor would pretty much make it a wash. 
Of course the rail adapter also gives somewhere to mount a brake lever. There are other ways it can be done of course: I like the ingenuity shown at the bottom of the tutorial in the following link.
http://unicyclebastards.com/articles/2007/05/12/brake-without-breaking-the-bank/
It looks like the Coker brake uses a similar approach, providing a plate that screws on in the same spot as the plumbing hangers linked above and has a short bar on which the lever mounts.
Am I missing some simple way to include a brake on this setup without additional hardware?
Those points of adjustability could be a good thing in crashes; something that bends will hold up better than something that’s rigid.
My Wyganowski setup has a pair of bar-ends on the front, attached to what was intended as a bumper. When I took that Coker off-road, it became much more likely that I’d drop it and after chewing up a few end-caps I finally figured out to loosen the bar-ends and flip them up and out of the way for MUni. I don’t think the bar-ends ever shifted position in a drop though. And this is with being dropped hard enough to pick up big clods of dirt (picture below).
But on pavement, I hardly ever drop the unicycle so I wouldn’t worry about that for myself. A long and low handle is going to be the first thing to hit the ground in a forward UPD, unless you add a further bumper in front of/below that (heavy). So we have to get used to the idea.
I expect they will carry them as soon as they can get some from Coker. Same for the tires, as they become available.
Not sure why you would need that. The Cokers come with Schwinn/KH-style posts, which allow a nominal seat tilt adjustment. That’s enough for me most of the time. Also the Coker brake attaches to a plate under the seat’s front bumper, so no need for a tube on the rail adapter. Because my Coker has a low pair of handles out front, I want my seat tilted a little downward. Fortunately I was able to start with an already-bent base on the steel post that came with my Wilder. A little bit of dainty work with the sledgehammer and I’ve “customized” it to a lower front tilt.
This is indeed a possibility. But I suspect if it’s that bendable, it’s going to move when you have your weight on it and you hit bumps. Or, that you can yank it back into place after a UPD, like banging on a crooked seat. No tools required, and you can probably do it while riding.
Like I mentioned above, I’m not even concerned about this, as I very rarely drop the unicycle on road rides. If I have a Coker handle and go on a MUni ride, I might just swing the whole thing around to the rear!
I don’t use a traditional brake lever. I use a friction shifter and it works like a dream!
The kh brake mount that sits under the front bolts is only about 40g and is cheap.
But if you are using a handle you want the brake on the handle anyway, probably attached to one of the bar ends on this particular handle, or at least that is how most T7 handle users I’ve seen have it set up. Be too hard to reach when you’re riding fast otherwise. I can’t see how you’d use the brake on the stock coker setup. It is in a weird ass place. Maybe it works though, have to see once someone has it.
Joe
Has anyone tried to order one of these handlebars from outside the US?
I tried to order one from the website but got a message saying I had to send an email to order it. I sent the email but have heard nothing back after several days. Is this normal?