While reading about Ultimate Wheel design, I realized an ultimate wheel could possibly have ‘adjustable cranks’ if the pedals were on a track that stretched from rim to hub to rim.
Furthermore, if the wheel actually spun on the rim, you could mount a seatpost on the rim and have a very strange looking unicycle with adjustable speeds via changing crank length.
(I can whip up a picture if this makes no sense)
How bizarre is that?
Is there a collection of strange unicycle designs online somewhere?
PS. I’d rather use this forum via the Usenet NNTP gateway, but it’s currently broken, does it break often?
If the pedals were attached to the inside of the wheel and so was the seat post, then pedaling would cause you to do a faceplant, ie. spinning the pedal would spin the seatpost. All you could do on it was rest your feet on the pedals and your butt on the seat while you travelled down a hill on the spinning tire. It would be similar to mounting a seat post on an impossible wheel or replacing your uni cranks with pegs that were attached directly to the bottom of the fork (ie. no pedaling).
If you think of the white parts and the grey parts as separate pieces, you can see how the wheel would turn, and the adjustable ‘cranks’ would give some semblance of different speeds.
Possibly I shouldn’t have shown both pedals on the visible side, and yes, the saddle is way out of proportion.
Oh, I’m using sodipodi to make SVG drawings and export them as PNG. It’s free and open source.
The weird wheel mounting might make such a design even more costly than a geared uni, I don’t know anything about machining costs.
Yeah, you’re right. That makes a lot more sense than i had it figured.
So, what you are really doing is making the same uni that we have now, but with a huge hub and a distorted frame to fit around the hub. Interesting.
Any volunteers to make this beast? It seems like it would take a lot of work to make some sort of baring to go between the lollipop and the wheel. Maybe there are industrial ones available like that that you could attach the top half of a regular uni fram to. Then you just need to work on the crazy wheel.
Another cool thing about this is that you could convert it to a kangaroo uni too.
For even more bizarre entertainment, if the version in that picture were built, you might be able to fit a lawnmower engine on the inside instead of pedals…
I was thinking of two other designs. One my cousin came up with and one I saw in Go Dogs Go (I think my favorite book of all time). Anyway first a hand driven BC wheel, and second an ultimate girrafe. Has anyone ever heard, seen, or conceived these ever before.
Wouldn’t a normal BC wheel serve well as a hand-driven one, provided it had pegs not footplates? One could simply hold it in one’s hands, run forward and jump into a handstand on the pegs. It would be theoretically possible to do this, although almost impossible in practice. Besides, I don’t think a BC wheel is really “driven” at all. You just stand on it and lean back and forth.
Someone posted a picture of a unicycle like that (except that it was a giraffe) some time ago. It had a metal ring for a wheel and was connected to the rest of the unicycle at 3 points along the top of the ring.
Does anyone remember where that picture can be found?
the main problem appeared to be the huge size of the bearings
I have found 35cm bearings that weighted “only” around 700g
but they are probably unable to withstand the lateral stress
moreover I think this design need 4 bearings instead of 2.
if you find this idea is not ridiculous I could publish another more radical design that show a draft about a geared Coker based of this idea of an ultimate wheel with a seat.
