yeah thats an idea, but how will could it hold up to trials?
do you need suspension for trials? No. Hell, the bike trials guys do 15 foot drops with no squish. I thought this was more intended for muni.
Suspension Uni Frame
For those who may not have seen it, here is a Suspension Coker Frame that I think has been around awhile and tested. I had to carefully study the images to begin understanding the design. Seems very cool.
Wow, those are cool! But notice they are front wheel hubs, not drive wheel hubs. One of those would be wicked cool to try out on a BC wheel…
Yep. Though about it for a couple more seconds and I see that it wouldn’t be very useful. They do have rear models though that might work with a giraffe (if modified to remove the freewheeling action). Speaking of which, it seems like a truly effective suspension uni design would have to isolate the cranks from the axle.
You guys have it all wrong. If you are on a unicycle, what you want is to be able to feel the bumps in the ground, and have solid control of the unicycle. Having suspension in a unicycle, besides for just the seat, will create a totally unresponsive unicycle that is hard to control, because any minute wheel corrections to compensate for a bump, will be totally lost in the suspension. It’d be like riding a chain-driven giraffe with a loose chain. When you need input NOW, you’ll get it shortly after, which will by then be too late. The only kind of suspension I see any use for is for the seat, and even then, only minimal amounts. You forget that you are relying on constant control of that single wheel to stay up, where as on bikes, no matter how much the wheels are moving in relation to the frame, your feet are always on the control inputs, the pedals, which are also in the exact same position in relation to the rear wheel.
But the whole idea of suspension is to remove the need to compensate for bumps in the first place. You just roll right over them like they weren’t there.
The pedal suspension, as diagrammed, wouldn’t work for MUni, because it would only work when your pedals were parallel to the ground, or nearly so.
suspension uni
I actually did see a working suspension unicycle at last years MadFest outside of Madison, Wisconsin. I didn’t get a picture of it, does anyone else have one?
Essentially, it used the suspension ripped out of a fancy bicycle frame. It looked like a very wide >. Seat top left. Wheel Bottom Left. The right side was a hinge, and it was spring loaded in the middle. There was a rather complex chain drive that picked up the slack when the spring was compressed. It worked perfectly for Connie Cotter. I unfortunately was too heavy and bottomed out the suspension, which ruined the fun of it.
Sorry if the description wasn’t good enough. It is a very stable, but complex design.
The argument that suspension isolates you from the bumps is also an argument against using big tyres, which isolate you from small bumps. If you take it to it’s logical conclusion you should probably be riding on the rim.
In fact, by using a 3" tyre, you’re already giving yourself a couple of inches of travel. Do you really need more travel?
The hub suspension things that I’ve seen have such short travel that they’re only worthwhile for narrow road tyres as with a fatter tyre the effect is lost.
Joe
Re: suspension unicycle
“joemarshall” <joemarshall@NoEmail.Message.Poster.at.Unicyclist.com> writes:
> The argument that suspension isolates you from the bumps is also an
> argument against using big tyres, which isolate you from small bumps. If
> you take it to it’s logical conclusion you should probably be riding on
> the rim.
A tire smoothes out the ride not just by compressing the air inside,
but also by conforming to the surface beneath it. Suspension systems
usullay employ dampers as well as springs, giving them very different
characteristics from a bouncy tire. Even with lots of suspension
you’ll still want a tire if the surface you ride on has any
irregularities. To see what I mean, look at bicycles and motorcycles
with suspension.
Ken
The reason fat tires work is because they are always connected to the unicycle at one point, the rim. I have been thinking about this some more today, and the reason it wouldn’t work is because the suspension many people are talking about would let the wheel move any which way it wanted, on all axes on the plane in the center of the wheel, meaning basically the only restricted movement would be side to side within the frame. If you had this, if you hit a large bump like a curb or a root or a rock, the wheel would stay put until you hit the end of the suspension travel, in which case either the frame would be thrown forward, and also you, or the wheel would jerk up with such force as to throw you off. The ONLY way I see a suspension between the ground and the frame is if the wheel were restricted to only one axis of movement, such as on a bike’s front suspension. The wheel could only move up and down, or back and forth, and there is no current technology to enable that to happen, as the wheel would be turning all the time, so the suspension would have to turn counter to that. This makes sense in my head, as I usually can visualize things well, but if you are totally lost as to what I’m talking about, just let me know and I will try to explain it in simpler, easier to grasp terms.
I think THIS THREAD more realistically addresses unicycle suspension at the point at which it would be effective. To be effective, the cranks have to flex in the vertical axis somewhere between the axle and the pedal. At the same time the cranks must not twist along their own axes which would cause the pedals to tilt.
I think that current bike technology could be adapted to a unicycle, but it would have to be pretty sophisticated to be rideable. The path of travel would have to be dialed, and bobbing due to pedal forces would have to be mimized. But again, both of these issues have been largely solved with bikes.
But as was pointed out, a large tire can probably provide as much rolling suspension as a rider needs (and can handle). I think the real benefit of a suspension frame would be for riding large drops with minimal roll-outs. That may be an entirely different puzzle to solve.
I know someone already posted this site in relation to cokers but http://www.creativegeckos.com/pages/suspension-frames.htm have a couple of full suspension frames for sale, interesting idea of not using telescopic shocks to avoid problems with tyre hitting crown etc. althougy they do just look like extra weight to me
Dave
get this back up with my design for suspension
its hard to explain so if you dont get it i understand
suspension.pdf (167 KB)
That seems a lot like what what stated four years ago with this http://www.pantourhub.com/products.html#hub
yah i was basically trying to explain how i thought it worked since i couldnt find anything on the website
![img-1021-tm[1].jpg](https://cdn.unicyclist.com/uploads/default/original/3X/4/a/4a284e3a33cab6d07a30b447eeca03902536ded8.jpeg)
