Hello, folks of this forum.
I’ve been here for a few months now, and I post from time to time, but I’ve never written anything more in-depth than a few paragraphs. I’ve just recently actually done a few things that merit writing about, and I figure I’ll put them all into this one thread.
- The Ghetto BC Wheel
it was a little more than a month ago that I saw some people talking about BC wheels on here, and finally realized what that guy was riding in the UNiVERSE trailer through the parking lot, and decided it looked dangerously fun enough to try. My first attempt consisted of a trip down to the good ol’ LBS, who despite being rather in disbelief at what I claimed to want and be able to do, sold me a set of BMX pegs. I put these on an old back wheel from a kids’ bike I had, and since I couldn’t really mount it, got up the nerve to jump mount the thing, going at most three or four metres.
This was all well and good, until one time I jumped on the rear cog, woefully still present, and did a bodyslam into the pavement. That ended my fun for that day, and gave the kids I was talking to at the time something to tell their parents about. A few days later (after the wounds had healed!) I was out again giving it a go, this time minus the coaster brake.
Sadly, the pegs did not give me the control I needed, so I had to abandon that wheel, and now it sits, tube, tire, and one-pegged in my basement. I decided after reading around here a bit to try and get some platforms, and after a call to Darren Bedford, realized that platforms were way more than I had the cash for at the time, especially for what was at that time just a fun experiment.
I did, however, have an idea. I called up a metal shop in the area, and asked them if they had any spare angle iron, about four inches wide and tall, and they said they did. I asked what it would cost to get two plates made with axle holes drilled, and they suggested ‘a beer’ would be a good payment. Sadly, I’m under the drinking age, so he didn’t get his beer, but they were quite helpful, and I ended up with some slightly heavy, not pretty but very functional BC plates. I thanked them profusely and went off to mount them on my wheel.
About a month passed, during which time I was unicycling very little due to filling in time at my dad’s print shop while people were on vacation (gotta pay for auto insurance and my unicycle addiction somehow!), and I finally had the bright idea to find some bars and a gentle slope to mount the bc with instead of running and jumping on. Within about two hours I was able to go ten feet on a good try, which was excellent progress for me. By now my poor rear bike wheel was starting to bend, and the 3/8ths axle was pretty much shot and destroying my rolling momentum from its resistance.
Well, to make a long story a little bit shorter, I went down to the bike shop after some consideration, and used a bit of my latest paycheque to get myself a BMX frontwheel, 50$, with a 14mm axle and an alex doublewall rim, 48-spoke. I put the old Kenda K-RAD 2.125 from my norco on there, inflated the tube, and just now I am spraypainting the plates black, since the red metallic paint I got did not stick to the metal well (I am bad at sanding!).
I guess the whole point of this story is that a BC wheel doesn’t have to cost hundreds of dollars, in fact, you can probably do it up for about 50. It’s also incredibly fun, definitely on par with learning to uni for the first time, and perhaps even more ridiculous. I can’t wait till I can control my speed and be able to push myself along with one foot, then it’ll perhaps be a viable method of transportation even. That would be best of all.
I’ll post some pictures later on, since I’ve lost my mouse and it’s terribly annoying to upload anything without it.
- Giraffe Trailing
I decided one day, while I was bored, to give the poor giraffe which sat a bit unused in the other room a bit of a workout. It’s a 5’ torker unistar TX, definitely a worthy machine for some light jogging trails. I inflated the airseat conversion (which sadly has a hole in it and needs a bit of fixing), and set off down my street.
My street is a gentle slope which ends in a cul-de-sac, with a path leading through a hole in a fence out onto the freeway. After waiting for the cars to give me a break, I rolled the uni over the eastbound lane, then the median, then the westbound lane, and onto the walking trail which began on the other side. After performing a freemount on the first go, I crossed the arched footbridge over a small stream, and after passing through a a little bit of forest and a few startled onlookers, I eased myself down onto the sidewalk, being careful not to overstress the giraffe, and rode down the street I was now on.
I was riding through some residential housing on my way to a trail which is kept up very well, due to being a popular jogging spot for many of the staff at the university on one side of the pond the trail circles. After climing a deceptively hard hill, I finally got to some crushed gravel. Out onto the trail, I started the first big climb, no trees in the way yet, with a fantastic view out to the south of about five or six thousand cars of hospital workers and patients. Parking lots look pretty neat when they’re full.
A little farther along, over a few footbridges and past the helicopter emergency pad, the real trail starts. The trees begin, and this is where I, at nine feet tall, begin to encounter problems. The first hundred metres of the path only has the branches cleared out to about six and a half feet, which leads to me bending over and getting a leafy face. All is well after some steep downhill (which later becomes uphill, and rather nasty uphill at that) however, and soon I am cruising over some wonderfully smooth humps on the trail, spinning away and putting both awe and confusion into the minds of every jogger I pass.
The halfway point, the other end of the pond, is the Fluvarium, a building at which you may see the stream through very thick glass windows set within it, a reasonably popular tourist attraction. I decide to hop off and go in to grab some (overpriced) water, and I end up answering some questions about my mighty steed from the cashier. She walks out from behind the counter to get a better view of me while I’m getting on outside.
A bit of twisty singletrack and a nasty headwind later, I’m on the other side of the pond, in the open with no trees to worry about. I quickly and uneventfully get around this side of the pond, and I decide to take a different route back, along the side of the freeway. It’s a good change of pace, especially for my now exhausted legs, and I get a few honks from passers-by, reaching home again via sidewalk in about fifteen minutes.
All told, it probably took me about an hour and a half, and was roughly a 8km ride. I guess that’s farther than most people would ride a giraffe. I don’t think I could have gone much further without an air pump, since I was starting to feel the seat bolts in my poor poor rump. I definitely gained some confidence on the ‘tall one’ that day, and hopefully when work ends (this week!) I can get out again.
- The Vert Ramp
This is my story of pain and sorrow. It started out fine, however, as such things often do.
It was Wednesday, perhaps two weeks ago, and we were having our very first St. John’s Unicycle Club meeting, to which the turnout was really not that great, perhaps due to rain and lack of unicyclists in the immediate area.
It wasn’t raining that much when I got there, more of a light drizzle, but enough to make everything a little bit slick. I was riding my 20" freestyle - sem longneck frame, sem seat, primo ‘the wall’ tire, a very slick solid machine, and doing my standard repertoire of warm-up tricks - spins to the left, to the right, wheel walking, a few different mounts, some one footed foolery.
The spot we’d picked for unicycle club was quite nice, a not-quite skatepark which wasn’t good enough to attract any serious skaters, having only one ramp and a few fun boxes, but which still had a very smooth pavement surface for riding on. Very enjoyable.
I was doing my thing, riding around, when a group of skeets (see: chav, skully, kev, skater punk) walked up, and being nicer than usual, yelled at me to ride the vert ramp. I obliged, having done so many times before, and being quite confident at getting about halfway up before riding back down backwards.
Today, however, it was wet out.
The ramp was slick. It’s slick when it’s not wet, and the light coating of water did not help, nor did my 85psi tire, and when I reached the apex of my forward moment, the wheel stopped. Then it slid. It slid very quickly, and before I knew it, my face and the ramp had a fight, and my face lost. I came up spitting blood and adrenaline, and a bit of my tooth. A cursory examination of my dental situation with my tongue revealed a large portion of my front tooth missing, and so, feeling rather dazed I decided it was high time to head to an emergency room to get drugged up before pain set in.
Telling the skeets to piss off when they asked me if they could have my tooth (I am later told that one of them found it and walked away with it in triumph. Weird.), I rode very quickly to my car and got myself to the nearest hospital, where they stitched up a nasty gash in my chin I didn’t know I had, and got me a dentist appointment the next day.
I managed to shatter the tooth, so it had to be pulled. At 18 years of age, I now have a denture, and a glass of water on my bedside table. And a neat party trick.
What can I say, I’m having about as much fun as I can with a missing tooth, and it’s actually not that bad. And hey, if I could trade my times on the uni for my tooth, I’d take the good times.
- What I’ve learned from unicycling.
When I first heard of unicycling, I didn’t figure I could do it. One wheel? You can’t possibly ride that. And if you could, you can’t possibly do anything at all strenuous on it, since you’d be trying to keep your balance all the time, right? Wrong.
When I first got my uni, I just wanted to ride it well enough to be able to get around - after all, I’ve always been a sucker for alternate transportation, being known to rollerblade and bike already, why not add the uni to my possible method list?
Well, pretty soon, I’d found out about the skill levels and was practicing my ass off to try to get to level five before the summer was out. I saw someone wheelwalking and figured, ‘eh, if I can get to where he is, I’ll be satisfied. That’s a pretty amazing skill, I don’t think I’ll ever be doing it.’ And here I am, more than capable of wwing, and loving every minute of it.
When I first heard of MUni, I didn’t think I’d be able to handle that. There was no way you could get the balance down without years of training, right? Heck no, I’ve been riding any trail I can find now, and what once seemed distant and impossible is now within reach.
I guess what I’m trying to say here is that what the uni has taught me, above a heightened sense of balance, a sense of achievement, and better self-esteem, is that if I want to do something, learn something, build something, I can.
It might take me a while, I might have to learn other things first, and the path might not be immediately clear. But I can learn to do almost anything, and if I really want it, and go for it, I can do it. Of course, this has been said to me a lot in my lifetime, but the uni really helped drive it home.
I’ve learned from unicycling that the impossible can become possible, and all you need is time.
Cheers,
-Dave
