I decided to build a bit of a custom 29er for my daily commuter. My 24 muni is to small and my 36er is a bit much in traffic sometimes on my ride through downtown Seattle. I like them both but thought a 29er would be just right. Did some research and talked to Josh at UDC and this is what I have so far.
Velocity Blunt rim. (very light)
Schwalbe big apple 2.0 tire. (may try tubeless at some point)
Nimbus Oracle hub
KH seat post and handle bars
Nimbus gel seat
I had the wheel built at my LBS and he did a great job. Gotta order my frame, cranks and brake now that the holidays are over. Ride safely everyone.
I’ve kind of finished with this project some time ago but I haven’t really taken it out for a a ride yet and I do want to add a few more finishing touches and add some dangling trinkets here and there.
Thought I’d share some work in progress pics too. Most of the add-ons are plastic and my uni frame is alu so it’s all pretty lightweight.
Thanks! I don’t have a 36", just a 29" but I’m using that for actual crash-and-bash riding. I figured you can’t really do much with a pimped up uni except to be geekier than usual on the streets.
Also, I do travel with my other unis so I don’t think the add-ons would stand the handling.
Nah, I’m sure you’d figure it out quicker than I could. It’s way ahead of my abilities right now, but the last parts I needed got here so I built it up and it’ll be ready when I am.
It certainly can’t be as bad as a BC wheel. Mounting it is easy with the wheel in the grass where it can’t roll. You can hold it up with the bar (a decapitated 300mm x 22.2 steel seatpost actually) and step on one foot at a time. And the bar seems to works well enough as a seat, so wheel walking should be like on a standard unicycle except without the spinning cranks. That’s supposing I ever learn how to wheel walk!
Do you have details on how you did this? It looks great! I’ve been wanting something similar except with a saddle instead on handle bars and a disc brake.
Meant to be ridden or attempted at least. Inspired by this video and this discussion, and also from watching videos of flatland bmx riders who rarely touched any part of the bike besides the bars and the front pegs.
So yeah, purely aesthetic pretty much.
Thanks! There’s nothing more to it than what you see: 1.5" 48-hole bmx rim on a Suzue front hub with 14mm axle, standard Diamondback pegs, a closeout bmx fork from eBay, basic bmx stem, slightly dinged spare Sun unicycle seatpost, and Wal-Mart grips. To mount a saddle, I guess you’d want to slot the top of the fork and clamp a seatpost in. (25.4 mm I think, but I could measure if you wanted to know for sure.)
Thanks for the info! I’m not sure where the Sun unicycle seatpost comes in. It also seems like bicycle forks usually have a lip at the top and I wonder if in addition to cutting a slot that this lip needs to be cut off, too. The plan I have for doing something like this is to have a unicycle seat, disc brakes, and BC plates (instead of pegs).
The Sun unicycle seatpost–with the bracket hacksawed off–is the handlebar! It just happened to be the right diameter and it seemed as likely a shape as any, not knowing any better. Not necessarily my final choice…
There are different fork steerer configurations out there, esp threaded vs. threadless, but this one doesn’t have any noticeable lip to it. Anyway cutting a steerer to suit the frame and rider is normal and super easy. But one of the things I liked about this fork was that the steerer is pretty long (200 mm) and hasn’t been cut.
I noticed that a 20" BC wheel just showed up in the Trading Post btw. It would have been cheaper and easier to start with that if it had been there a month ago.
Got any idea on how you’ll do the disk brake? Not that you shouldn’t, but you seem to lose the easy connections to the BMX world with that.
Cool. For what I’m imagining I would just buy a peg-style drift trike front end with a disc brake. I already have BC plates I could put on it so I would just need to have the notch cut and put in a seat post and seat post clamp. However, this is not my immediate next project so I probably won’t do anything about it until after Unicon.
I just need to bind the uprights into the proper position, and place the slots (stacked on left) under each wheel with the wooden blocks as stoppers behind the wheels. I might swap out the line on top of each one for velcro instead. This would allow me to flip the shorter uni’s up so their neck and saddle is out of the way.
I’m working on a couple freewheel projects I thought I’d mention here in case anyone has feedback or constructive criticism.
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Reversible frame. I'm having two disc tabs welded to a Nimbus 26" muni frame, spaced for a 203mm rotor on the front and 160mm on the back. I'm doing this to try out a larger rotor but still have a fallback if it doesn't work out or for different wheelsets. I've determined that aluminum frames don't give me the stiffness I need for braking and the combination of a steel frame plus an aluminum D'Brake mixed with the near-constant braking requirements of a freewheel is a recipe for eventual equipment failure.
Fat freewheel. I bought [this 24" Surly Conundrum frame](/t/surly-conundrum-frame-large-marge-rim-iowa/122159/1) from the Trading Post. I'm planning to see if it will fit a 24x4" tire like the Vee Rubber Mission tire. I'm also going to have a disc tab welded to the frame once I determine if a 203mm rotor is viable for me. I haven't seen a 24" Conundrum with a 4" tire and I'm curious if anyone else has one or has seen one. On-One is releasing a 24" version of their Floater tire in a couple months so that may be another possibility.
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you haven’t seen any 24" Conundrum used to the full because until recently, there was no 24x4.0 tires available (Surly dropped the Endomorph 24x4.0 and all the subsequent fat tires).
It is the On-One baby fatty announcement that revived the 24" world and gave the hope to 24" Conundrum owners to to over 24x3.0
Anyway, I can’t wait to see pics of your projects
P.S.: worst case scenario, you still can run maggies on your Conundrum of disc braking doesn’t work the way you expect…
Yes, it seems the Baby Fatty was delayed a bit but I found it in the wild recently. That one has the Vee Rubber Mission tire but the 24x4" On-One Floater is supposed to come out in the next couple months. Thanks for reminding me about maggies! They don’t give me a sufficient braking environment on my 36" freewheel and I expect the result to be the same on the Conundrum but it’s certainly worth a try. On my 26" freewheel unicycle I currently have a 160mm rotor mounted on a D’Brake. On steep, paved descents I have to be careful of my speed because I can go faster than I can control easily with the brake. When I’m getting to that point I have to yank extra hard on the brake in pulses instead of the continuous modulation I prefer. I want to compare my current setup in that scenario against a 203mm rotor mounted on a steel disc tab (and a 160mm rotor mounted on a steel disc tab if that ends up being too much). I run sintered disc pads so can drop down to semi-metallic, too.
I was thinking a backdoor boot-scrubber would do the job, but the farm-store wanted $35 for one. So I sacrificed 2 old scrub brushes and made my own.
Use heavy scrap lumber, stand back, and watch out for the flying spiked pedals!
Maybe I could give it a cheesy name like “The Marriage Saver” and make a million dollars.
Nah, I’m sure you’d figure it out quicker than I could. It’s way ahead of my abilities right now, but the last parts I needed got here so I built it up and it’ll be ready when I am.
