UnPlanned Dismount? More like Crash!!!
As some of you may know, I am now another Cokeur convert. I picked it up yesterday from a friend of mine that had ridden it for about an hour then never touched it. Twas a pretty sweet deal for 300 bucks Canadian. I rode it for the first time about three seconds after giving him the money and promptly rode it home. After sitting down I immediately hated the saddle, but overall I found it easy to ride, I noticed no difference performance wise between it and my 29er, although the cranks were 150 and I have 125’s on my 29er. I found it kind of boring to ride and was actually expecting at least some challenge out of it. Today I changed that. I built up an almost perfect saddle (it’s only half assembled so far) and I put 125 mm cranks on it!! HUGE DIFFERENCE. The second I mounted I noticed that riding it was completely different, I no longer control the wheel, it controls me! After a couple loops outside my house I was able to get the hang of it again, although fine tuning speed still evades me but I will come to that soon. After putting a back bumper and a cover on the saddle, I decided that despite the heat (no joke a little over 48 degrees with humidex, or 118 for yall yanks :p) I would take it out for a quick half hour practice ride. I rode around stopping for lights and riding through crowds at the bus station with little event, but I found it pretty much impossible to stop without dismounting and even my jump mount felt a little shaky. I then started along the bike path and quickly decided to go another route that would take me in kind of a loop. I then promptly had a small UPD and my Coker flew down the path knocking a bolt out of the bumper, O well you only need one. I then went through a straight flat path and thought that it would be a good place to test the speed of a coker. So I leaned on the tiny cranks and got going at quite a pace, my guess is about 20-25 KPH (10-15 MPH) maybe more but I won’t say more cause I really don’t know. Anyway as I started to go faster I reached a peak and was thrown off of my unicycle! I landed on my feet and tried to run but my legs just couldn’t move fast enough and I found myself rolling and bouncing along the concrete bike path – O what fun! I quickly picked myself off and despite a cut up arm, torn pants (I assumed more cuts in there as well) chopped up hands and scraped up back, I figured I would continue my saddle test and just take it at an easier pace. So in the end I finished up by doing about a 7 or 8 Km loop in about a half hour including a nice chat I had with my friend Steph who was rather surprised to see such a big wheel on such a hot day.
This was my first experience really with a Coker and on the 125mm cranks it was something of a spectacle. I can’t wait for it to cool off so I can put some real distance on it, and hopefully I will get a computer for it as well but not until I stop dropping it as often as I do :p.
For those that are interested the seat I’m riding on it right now is a viscount with the cover taken off and hollowed out similar to this. Then I took a Belkin WaveRest gel keyboard wrist support, chopped it so that there is one piece running down the length of the seat and another piece in the but making a sort of T with the two pieces, then I tossed on an old KH cover. At this point there is no handle but I will probably be putting a KH handle on it to follow.
Thanks for reading,
Nathan Tappin
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