Its getting harder now to find good quality parts for older unicycles with square tapered hubs, but there are a lot of unicycles out there with this old interface, and alot of people who still ride and learn on them. You can’t absue them as much as the hubs with the isis interface, but these older unicycles still bring joy to people and I still have a soft spot for more classic unicycles.
I thought I would start a topic to share parts for building nice and light builds with the good old faithful square taper unicycles, so here I start with a really cool crankset I found for electric bikes that doesn’t have a chainring and with a length of 89mm will be great for freestyle on an older unicycle!
My first “trainer” unicycle had this cheap ass mechanical square shaft connection. The pedal kept getting loose. I couldn’t find a socket wrench that was thin enough to fit. Only stupid needle nose pliers would work. Guess why? It was a metric nut on a standard(inch) threaded hub shaft. How fkn stpd is that.
It was a 50$, 24" wheel POS from amazon. Learned my lesson. Then bought a $150 Torker. It was solid with a double lever seat clamp, ISIS splined hub. There’s a reason why a tapered spline is needed on a unicycle. A square hub design has play and will all eventually loosen up. There’s sloppy tolerances needed for mfg and unicycle riding(especially learning) is very rough on the fasteners.
I’m pissed cuz it took me an additional 40 hrs to learn how to ride, thanks to that stupid unicycle(plus my foolishness to pick a larger wheel size). If I were like most people, I would have quit the unicycle, forever. Never known ingthe feeling of unicycle “superpower”.
Advice to beginners. Don’t go cheap and forget the nostalgia. Especially, those old schwinn unicycles with stupid bolt and nut seat post locks.
I like square taper too, and I haven’t broken any despite my best efforts. I’ve done countless miles of road and off-road trails without issue, jumped off tables and ledges and stairs, and just overall thrown around the square tapers, yet they still don’t break. Also all my square taper unis have single walled rims, so they shouldn’t even be alive anymore but here we are. (Well one folded but I laced in a donor from a even worse off b*ke)
About those old Schwinn’s, I learned on one and it was a unique experience indeed. The seat was far too short for me, the pedals were the slipperiest things in the universe, fit for lining a non stick pan, and one crank developed a dead zone where it just goes a quarter rotation or so with no effect on the wheel. It is such a different experience that it is more difficult to ride now having ridden unis in better working order than it was to ride when it was all I knew. And I could hop around and 180 and jump curbs and stacks of wood and all with that thing at one point.
Back on topic for this thread, I really like the square taper cranks that came stock on my Club 24". They have a healthy amount of Q factor, which I really like cause I’m quite duck footed. I think all the standard square taper cranks on UDC US, the United brand it appears, have this Q factor. That being said, for those that don’t like Q factor, I don’t know where to find straight cranks. However, there’s always the old vise and hammer to straighten things out.
How we soon forget that square tapers where all there was, infact my coker big one has them and it was the dream unicycle for lots of riders 20 years ago. Many riders put thousands of miles on these unicycles. I started back riding on a used Udc 29er, which I still have. I put loads of miles on this basic unicycle experimenting with different tires and crank sizes as I honed my skills. I am a huge advocate of the trainer/titan line as they are inexpensive, customizable and you can go up in wheel sizes to 32:and 36 with out breaking the bank.
Not everyone is doing trials or muni putting unnatural strains on the uni. For a lot of riders a uni with square tapers is more than sufficient.