So, I had the problem this summer riding RAGBRAI on my nimbus 36" of headwinds. Being 6 or 7 feet straight up sucked. I tried several different ways to get down into the T7 handle but all led to discomfort. I let this go and took it as learning somethign from the experience. Fast forward to today. I realized something while helping my friend rebuild his fixie and rushed to our favorite bike shop…here are the results.
I really like the position and shape of these bars. They offer more stability because they extend further out laterally. Also they are lower and provide more of an aero position for battling winds. Updates to come as I ride it further like this. I’ve only ridden it about 1.5 miles from the LBS back to the apartment. The image quality sucks as per the usual with my camera…but all other comments or thoughts would be lovely
Looks interesting… Are you worried that you might catch your feet on them during UPD though? How did you put it together? All off the shelf components?
Have you considered looking at making more conventional “drops”? E.g get some longish curved bar ends and bolt them onto the horns of the T7 facing downwards (and a bit outwards). Seems like it could be interesting…
I basically went into the parts bin of our bike shop and built it from scrap. The bars are standard steel bars and there is no label on the headset part but its basically flipped backwards so it will fit on the T7 unshimmed. The only thing to watch for is that you make sure the headset stem is zero angle. If its not, when you flip it around and mount it all, the bars will be angled crooked. This isnt good :p.
I haven’t had any issues with UPDing from the front in the time Ive been playing with this between posts but the bars are short so I wouldn’t snag them as easily. Just kick the feet out a bit if I feel like I’m going to UPD forward. My personal seat angle usually always makes me UPD backwards. I considered standard drops but they would come out too far for me to be comfortable with them even though I dont UPD frontwards. The short bars give me a bit of assurance that if I ever did go off the front I wouldnt get caught up Ive experimented with the bar ends idea but I was never happy with thwe results. They just weren’t low or wide enough to get down out of the wind and/or give enough control (wide parts there). The wider the bars are on my uni, the better control I seem to have with them laterally
looks awesome. if you come again next year i’ll have to give it a shot. (this is mark, the tall blonde guy with the pony tail who wasn’t there for a few days) waves
It’ll probably take some getting used to, but I’d like to see you ride it this year. It might be hard on your wrists since it’s straight and not angled like the T7 and GB4.
I dont plan on going clipless in the long run. I tried a pair on my 24" and it was a little intense for me. Joe did buy a pair of speedplay frogs and he may be riding on them by next year
Also, one of our other unicyclists is considering RAGBRAI with us but may not be riding the entire route on a unicycle. His plan is to ride a 12 inch childs bike (geared up to 24 or 26 gear inches) with a huge seatpost, tall handlebars and a nicer saddle. He picked it up a few weeks ago and started doing some work on it and we’re riding a 40 mile trip this weekend with him.
Really? I have never UPDed backwards (except when I was learning how to ride). I always have to take a giant leap off and in front of the Nimbus. I think I would be a tiny bit worried that a foot or knee would bash into the horisontal handle bar. I will be interested in reading about your forthcoming experience.
I’ve been riding it a bit more today and forced myself to hop off the front in the grass as to not kill the cycle. The results were nice. The bars are short enough to allow my legs around them normally and they are high enough up off of the wheel t hat I won’t get my upper legs snagged in them. I’m fairly pleased. It will take a bit more riding to completely get used to them but we’re doing a 40 mile ride on Saturday and I’ll do a write up on it then.
I realized that I never came back to do the write up of the 40 mile ride we did. Well I’m at work right now but I did notice that being crouched over further on the lower bars gave me a lot more stability and I felt much more confident in riding quickly without falling. More to come when the snow subsides…
