I like the time machine idea, but I think we’ll see a 4-speed, shift-on-the-fly hub way earlier.
UnimakerX, good luck with getting some working prototypes. Once you have something functioning, then it’s time to plan for the next step. Getting it to work will determine a lot of the cost and complexity of the final product.
And living “somewhere” in southeast Michigan, you may live near to one of the cradles of mountain unicycling (Livonia). So don’t let people give you a hard time about your local terrain!
My apologies. I fully support the exchange of ideas and the enthusiasm.
The original post is a help wanted ad looking for a person to demonstrate a product as a paid employee, but there currently appears to be no existing product, no company, and no money.
So, I do wish him the best of luck with his project, but in my opinion it is premature and misleading to be offering employment at this time.
I agree, I am trying to find a way to delete this thread. In the first message though, I stated that I would have prototypes later on, preferably by the end of this year. And I stated I was looking for collaborators as well. But you have a point.
I have several sketches and I am working on Blueprinting the last ideal with Tommy from the Unicycle factory before building it.
I didn’t quite explain it the way I wanted to, this was just an attempt to interest people in the possibility of future employment or partnership, not now.
Of course If any of this comes to fruition i will indeed pay, but notice the words in this message FUTURE!
THANKYOU FOR FEEDBACK, And the 1 post about unicycle time machines was kind of funny, I got the point, but I think you would be impressed with a prototype of what I am working on, perhaps a little surprised beyond expectation…
this post is a little premature and gives away “secret information”, can anyone please tell me how to delete a thread?
I do currently have future demonstrators interested, but if your interested in partnering up and/or also demonstrating then I can put you on my contacts. Although the demonstration future position is filled at the moment, should that change I will let you know if you ask.
Don’t bother deleting the thread no one will be taking any information from the thread to beat you to making a 4 gear planetary gearing hub.
Everyone would be interested in one but unicycling makes you very little money so no one is going to bust a gut to go and use your secrets to complete your idea first. You are better off leaving the thread up so that in 5 years time if someone who is interested in something similar, stumbles across the thread and your idea has not come to fruition they may contact you to try and kickstart it again as a collaboration.
I have never ridden a Schlumpf or otherwise geared unicycle, but 4 ratios seems to be reaching excessive. With 4 ratios, and two of them being overdrives, you’d seem to quickly reach a point where the weight of the unicycle is out of balance with the torque lost when shifting to a higher gear. Would your design limit rotational weight, or even better; all weight?
Also, you could likely shift between planetary gears if that’s the approach you choose. You could have the shifting mechanism move the sun gear to a different set of planetary gears that are all rotating with the cranks and ring gear, but only one would be engaged with the sun gear at a time.
To simply the points:
many planet gears (driven by cranks, don’t slide side to side)
one sun gear that changes position
one long (along the axis of rotation) ring gear that has a changing internal
circumference to accommodate different sized planet gears. This would
connect to the spokes/rim
AJKJ excellent deduction, you touched on how my old ideals worked but not quite as close to my recent ideals, i will tell you this; I am using planetary gears which is all I will go into detail …not because i am afraid that somebody will “beat me to the punch” (I want to protect it but I would like to see more people come out with geared hubs anyways so I can get 1 for myself lol) but it would also be hard to explain it in words. I don’t know how each gear will feel until I actually build a rideable prototype, i personally deduce that the highest gears will benefit from momentum achieved at lower gears. Any torque for evasive acceleration or deacceleration will be greatly reduced, but as far as deacceleration goes that should be a great reason to add a brake system.
Perhaps it might also benefit from closer gear ratios as well.
Anyways you’d all be surprised to know i’m now trying to add a 3rd overdrive for a total of 5 gears! 5 gears seems to be the limit to my current concept which includes only 1 hollow stationary gear just to give you a little more info about it.
The truth is I am working with a certain company right now so if I told you guys too much that might be a breach of contract. Besides it would be a little premature to go into detail of something that may or may not work (I am hoping it will-like I said I am not sure about ridability but I sure think what i’m attempting to do is possible).
Now it sounds a little bit difficult to make a hub with 3 or 4 gears, but I myself have heard of bicycle internal geared hubs having as many as 14 gears! Why isn’t 3,4, or even 5 gears possible for unicycles and/or unicycle like arrangements"?"(rhetorical)
Perhaps a closer gear ratio and longer cranks for more leverage will help improve the torque. In my opinion (and that’s opinion only…) I feel that bigger wheels or high gears on a unicycle is like increasing your stride, kind of like walking on a taller pair of stiltz, if you go from that “angle” than if you have seen record stiltz walking attempts there has been some incredibly tall successful stiltz attempts. I do believe the forces within a 10 ft pair of stiltz is identical to the force experienced in theory to a 10 foot radius wheel (note radius not diameter). Of course a wheel with a 10 ft radius would not be rideable but could be artificially imitated through gears. Once again that’s just an assumption. Obviously the gear ratios of the final production model will take troubleshooting among other things. I will have to find the appropriate gearing for each gear for the widest range of unicycle riders possible, of course I could still make custom gear ratios by special requests, but 1 off custom ratio overdrive would cost more to produce per piece.
Overall, I think there are very few people that want to go as fast on a unicycle as they would on a road bike. I certainly would not. At best, it would be a niche of a niche market, so I wouldn’t expect to ever sell very many of these. It would seem to only appeal to rich, crazy people that don’t mind risking serious injury, or those that would purchase it just for the novelty of it.
I’m also curious about your intent here. You have no real experience or close friends or associates that ride, or at least in this extreme, fringe of unicycling. As far as I can tell, no one in the unicycle world knows who you are. You have no prototype to show, but you make big promises, and then there’s the question of why, with your apparent lack of insight into this, would you think it would be a good idea?
I’m not trying to be rude, I’m just being frank. If you are serious, I think this approach is going to be a hard sell. I’d really encourage you to spend more time asking “why”, and at least build a prototype that you can show before asking other people to get directly involved.
Best of luck. While admittedly, I’d likely never buy your product, I appreciate the engineering effort that goes into these things and hope to see photos or video of it someday.
Just a suggestion to the OP. Look up Justin LE in the search feature, and read about some of his projects. While not exactly the same as yours, his creations are very innovative, and they work. You may want to solicite his advice, or perhaps his collaboration. He’s very talented. (And a very good rider.)
(Gilby can delete a post/thread, but really, I see no reason to delete this thread. It’s not any less interesting that most threads, and compared to some, more so.)
Bradford, I am obviously doing this for personal reasons, obtaining a geared unicycle has been a dream of mine. Originally I saw a potential market to give people who could not afford the Schlumpf hub a chance to afford a geared unicycle but I decided that I would pull out all the stops and aim for the “moon” by cramming as many speeds into a hub as possible. I do however plan to sell conversion kits to convert standard unicycles to dual chains which should be an affordable option.
Let me tell you more about myself, at least about my unicycling particularly. First of all I like speed and I really mean I like speed. I had two aspirations. 1 to be the first Downhill mountain unicyclist (of course you guys know that is taken), and I wanted to be the Guinness world record for fastest Unicycle land speed (of course guinness turned down my record attempt)…anyways I understand geared unicycles are not for everyone…but geared unicycles are definately for me or anyone who wants 1
I admit this post is a little premature, and unicycling is a niche, but It is my belief that the smaller niche you are marketing than the less people will want to or actually exist to compete with you. I’ve gotten lots of interesting people who ride unicycles interested in this post so I accomplished that already, probably a little too early. I’mean sure any Ole person who knows how to ride a unicycle could be a future demonstrater/tester of my product should it come to fruition but I am quite pleased with the people who have replied.
Back to the niche market thing. Let me tell you that I also love motorcycles and cars, and those are big markets., but if you think that makes it easy to succeed in such a market than you would be severely mistaken. I can not compete with Any of the big 3 (Ford, Chevy, etc.) NOR WOULD I WANT TO since I work for one of them. Now as far as motorcycles go it’seems the same dilemma. Plus it will cost A LOT MORE TO BUILD A PROTOTYPE CAR OR MOTORCYCLE. I don’t know what to say, I just absolutely despise anything on 2 wheels without a motor ( i am a motorized bicycle motorcycle snob lol…I don’t think it makes me better though), and I got into unicycles to replace bicycles. That’said my story.
Now I was thinking of planning to hire someone in the future because I know there are more popular (not as important as the other attributes), skilled, and “hungry” unicyclist who are not afraid to “push the envelope” of the sport of unicycling. I only just seem to ride in my comfort level…plus you can’t be a good “professional” athlete in 3 different sports…I have other financial athletic goals and aspirations but I love unicycling,…I mean if I don’t put all these gears on a unicycle who else will???
I know I can’t expect everyone to not be cynical considering i’ve already have some of the top unicyclist interested. While I am not offended, this sure as heck won’t stop me from attempting to do what I want to do. I only wish other people, like the man in post number #33 actually does come out with his 3 speed, I would be delighted to actually see something on the market someday, that is the reason I am doing this. I myself am tired of waiting so instead of waiting 15 years for some greedy rich bicycle company to actually look into this I want to attempt it for myself and other people who are actually wanting to go faster.
Really I would hate to make this a competition, I am really enjoying the close knit community of unicycling and the ones who are helping instead of holding progress back.
I was once a member of the Redford Unicycle club as well, so I was associating with unicyclist before all this.
I think a good thing before even thinking about building a geared unicycle is riding thousands of miles with a Schlumpf geared unicycle, on different wheel sizes to well understand the needs by living it.
I mean, a schlumpf unicycle can feel very tricky at first, and you can arrive to the conclusion that 17/11 :1 is a bit too much, but then, after hundreds/thousands of miles on it, you can find the 1.545454 as a max top gear ratio a bit too low, on a 29er for example, compared to a bike with the same wheel size, bikers will pedal way slower than you.
If you have very few experience with shlumpf hub and want to build a two gears unicycle for example, you can project to build a geared unicycle with 1:1 and 1.33:1 ratio just because you haven’t ride long enough to feel the need of bigger ratio.
So my point is experience can make a good idea et even better one.
By the way, have you been riding a geared unicycle UnimakerX? (sorry if the answer has already been given)
Also Bradford, the fact I am not “big” in unicycling is of course why I am just in a way “settling” to build Unicycle related items, I already explained I am no Unigeezer or Kris holm, which is why I am looking to hire someone else. I don’t need or want all the attention in my personal life, I already explained this.
You of course don’t have to be famous to start a business I would hope and nothing is going to stop me from trying to build this 4 or 5 speed hub short of me dying in a high speed unicycling accident while juggling chainsaws bro. (That was a joke)
You guys must be working with schlumpf or the guy in post #33, which I explained earlier this isn’t about stealing anyones “Thunder”…i’m sure everyone thought Leonardo DaVinci and/or the Wright brothers were crazy…I mean somebody could always say why ride a unicycle…and I say the reason is because of course I want to good grief lol, why do anything these days.
I am definately or was definately considering getting a Schlumpf hub, and the people who designed obviously did a great job as I hear it is quite durable. It just seems $1750 could get me some nice blueprints for my sketches at the unicycle factory, so I plan on spending every last penny on that, a couple of years later you guys might actually see it lol. That gives plenty of room for other 3 speed innovations in the mean time. Currently I am thinking of testing or having other people test dual chain unicycles with different gear ratios. I would also love to collaborate with a company such as Schlumpf or Shimano or Nuvinci or Sturmey or Archer, but with the exception of Schlumpf none of them take unicycles seriously…go figure (sarcasm)…but that’s life.
