My feeling about guni is somewhere between Gizmoduck and those who are extremely happy with it.
I don’t have thousands of miles of guni but I do have between 1000 and 2000 miles of very mixed and most of the time complicated rides.
The hub was on a 26 then 26+ then 29+ and now it’s on a 36er.
One thing I notice : the bigger/heavier the wheel is, the more stable and natural it feels in high gear.
When I started to think about putting my hub on a 36er I compared G29x137 and ungeared 36x150 and I realized I enjoyed the 36er more (on my loops).
That’s why I decided to put the hub on a 36er since I already had one, but if I returned in the past was about to buy a schlumpf hub I don’t think I would do it again.
The geared hub adds a second dimension to the uni which is cool, It’s like you have two unicycle in one, and you can ride faster or just cruise with a lower pedaling cadence. On a G36 you can keep up with bikes without pedaling like a crazy.
But in high gear it never feels as natural as non-guni.
There is always a certain feeling of danger, a danger that I never feel on my other unis.
Also, the hub is heavy, it makes pedaling a bit harder in low gear compared to ungeared and there is a forward and backward play in the cranks in low gear and high gear, but you quickly forget it.
About the maintenance, I barely check the torque, I just check if the play in the shifting buttons is right which means the cranks are not loose, but all the tools are needed to set the uni correctly in the first place and to change cranks.
As I said, I don’t have thousands of miles on it, maybe I will enjoy it more if I manage to ride my G36 more often.
(Probably it’s been discussed before, but I didnt get a chance to read through many pages of this topic. Apologies if it did)
Who does it and is it safe? I mean safe for the hub. I dont mean crashing. I ridden plenty of times with the non geared, safety wise Im not too terribly concerned about because Im not doing traffic roads, but rather easy multi use bike trails. Does rain water and some muddy water harm the Schumpf hub?
It shouldn’t affect it really, the entire hub is pretty well sealed. With the price of it I’m keeping mine out the rain where possible, but I can’t really see it being that big a deal in reality
YIKES!
This is what I have read from previous posts. Not sure if he was riding through fresh or saltwater, but I dont think Im going to take a (very expensive) risk on my (by far) favorite wheel set up. Time to rebuild my standard 36 wheel for the upcoming wet winter😃
If you use it in harsh wet conditions you should protect it with enough grease. Where is grease, there won’t be water. And after the ride you should clean and dry it. Then, riding in the winter shall be no problem.
The newer Schlumpf hubs (the ones with the Kris Holm signature) were intended to be heavier-duty than the originals, and (theoretically) could be used for muni. Personally, I’ve only taken mine off-road once, and wouldn’t care to do it again. There are numerous videos of people riding them off-road, however.
I have ridden through numerous puddles, several inches deep, with no negative results, so I’m guessing that Kiwi Pete’s misadventure was anomalous.
Ouch! I doubt that water had anything to do with your problem, unless you opened things up and saw a bunch of rust or other obvious water-related issues.
My (older but KH version) Schlumpf hub broke when I was bumping over some railroad tracks. The wheel seized up. But this wasn’t a bearing problem (or a water problem), it was broken metal inside the hub blocking the wheel from rotating.
Once I got my warranty replacement (in 2012) I’ve had no issues at all, though I avoid riding in the rain. I don’t think any amount of “normal” rain should be an issue, though if you do it frequently I would follow the advice above and make sure you have a good coating of grease around the areas where the oil seeps out. This will keep the water from getting in, unless you’re submerging the hub in deep water, or washing it with high pressure water.
Ah good idea John Foss-- coat with a layer of grease for extra protection to the sides of the hub to keep water out. Im thinking perhaps lithium or bearing grease. I’ll try it soon as the wet season is nearly upon us. Thanks.
I’m riding mine all winter and it was quite a lot of times on muddy rides. I’ve bought it to use it But grease sounds like a good idea for harsh weather.
In general, the more experience you have with riding a Schlumpf, the more stable and natural it feels. You rode it with successively increasing wheel sizes. What you attribute to a bigger/heavier wheel might actually (or mostly) be an effect of having more experience.
I have two Schlumpf hubs, on 29" and on 36", and they feel equally natural.
Of course experience tends to increase how natural it feels, but still, when I took my hub away from my 26er to put it on a 29er I felt an immediate change in term of stability, and the same phenomenon happened when I put it on a 36" wheel.
I think the momentum of the wheel AND it’s geometry are part of the explanation.
The bigger the wheel is, the less sensitive to floor irregularities it becomes, and its higher momentum decreases this phenomenon you can feel when you ride in high gear very slowly (especially when you learn to ride a guni directly in high gear without shifting up) : the wheel wants to go further when you push hard on the pedal, or behind depending on which pedal you are putting torque on.
To me, the 36er in high gear feels more like a real 55" then a 26er in high gear would feel like a real 40er.
But there is still a speed range where the high gear on a 36er is worth it : 12-20+ mph bellow this speed I don’t find any real advantage to ride in high gear.
And bellow 9-10 mph I just struggle for nothing, but it still feels less awkward than when I was riding at very low speed with smaller gunis.
After spending a few weeks riding my G29 every day, I’ve gotten a bit complacent with the speed it goes, and have dropped my cranks to the ‘short’ (117mm) holes - what an insane experience, riding high gear with those short cranks! It’s also made the low gear that little bit more useful (As mentioned before, I’ve found the curse of the G29 people go on about to be 100% true - the high gear is where 99% of my riding is done with the low gear reserved for hard freemounts and heavily pedestrianized areas).
So now I’m curious what crank sizes you all run on your Gunis. It’s a tough one I think, because what might feel great on low gear might feel FAR too hard on high (For example, those people who run 100mm’s on an ungeared 36er), and what feels great on high gear might feel too slow on the low gear.
Mine is on 125, I just started to experiment with the high gear, I need to build more confidence but it’s getting fun. I totally hear what you’re saying if you were on 137, too long to be enjoyable for a road uni.
I’m still finding 125 challenging enough here on my G29 - still feeling the need to use low gear a lot of the time. 140 is my other option and what I’ve used mostly and I’m thinking I might go back to that for a bit to see if they feel comfortable and I can spend more time in high now I have got a bit of riding in on 125s. Though maybe I just need to try and get out every day on the guni for a couple of weeks - I wish I had somewhere more convenient and nicer to ride it.
I have 125/150 cranks on my G29 and run them in the 125 hole. I rode in the mountains (Yunnan Unicycle Tour) with this setup.
I have 137/165 cranks on my G36 and run them in the 165 hole. Physically I can easily get close to 30 km/h with this setup. But I don’t dare to go faster anyways, so shorter cranks would not be beneficial to speed, and detrimental to control.
The organisors of the Düsseldorf marathon (discontinued since a few years) have recorded and published geared hubs and crank lengths. You might be able to find them online somewhere. Google in German: results is “ergebnisse” and unicycle is “einrad”. Make sure that you have the unicycle results published by Frisch Auf, not the runners results. Then you have a whole bunch of answers to your question. Other marathon organisers may have done the same.
I’m riding my G32 with 150 usually which makes it easy to control in high, but definitely too long in low gear, but nice combination for commuting. For races or other fast rides I switch to 125 and I see the improvement in average speed immediately.
For G27.5 I use 137 and I like it a lot both in low and high gear. My cranks have another option of 110 and I used it a couple of days but found it too low. I’m thinking about getting 137/117 as I expect 117 would be nice for fast rides.
But grease sounds like a good idea for harsh weather.