An expensive bicycle hub? That’s understandable, what with the moving parts, bearings, seals, ect…
But as far as I can tell, a uni hub is an a axle (that the cranks bolt onto) and two circles with holes in them (to put the spoke ends into) why the hell are they so expensive?
Granted, Profile probably sells six uni hubs a year, but come on, $315us?!? Are they on crack? Not that I have any machines (or am good at anything) but these people that can make frames with their own tools must be able to make up something like a hub for $50, could they not?
Ridiculous. Same as the Kris Holm half-a-bike (I say this because it sounds right in this argument) on Unicycle.com…outrageous. the KH24 costs $1300 US! Here’s the breakdown as far as I can tell…
All the parts needed to make the uni (complete) - $250
These are racing hubs. High perfomance costs, man. These guys did R&D to produce their product, and they naturally want to turn a profit. You don’t have to buy them… you can get Suzues for $20.
You’d really scream if you knew what the retail markup on your computer was. Ya want a Porsche, ya pay Porsche prices. (Unless you can build one yourself)
The main dif between bicycle hubs and unicycle hubs is the location of the bearings. Unicycle axles move, too. Oh, yeah; and with unicycles, you only need one.
Interesting yet unsupported argument. Put the same energy into researching and proving that you can get a comparable hub built, domestically or overseas, and sell it for $50 per unit without losing any money, as you have put into whining about the high price of unique, high performance equipment. Surprise!
The same amount of energy? Let’s see, that was about 15 seconds worth of hung over brain use… hey, I’m gonna be rich! …Richer than Profile must be after selling 2 hubs
Buy a hardened Susue hub for $25 then if your looking for top value.
If you regularly bend your cranks or hub then think about buying going for the heavier, nearly unbreakable option.
Profile are a high performance/high price USA made outfit.
Their BMX cranks bottom brackets and hubs fall into a similar price bracket to their unicycle hubs.
Most customers for them have either bent loads of axles or are simply willing to shell out for the best**
KH unicycles come with North American small batch made frames - these are pricey but no more so than other hand made frames such as Wilder/Hunter/Wyganowski/DM I doubt if Kris is fitting out his new mansion on the proceeds !!!
He’s got a good point $1300 that’s alot of clams where I come from. And really what is all that extra bling going to?? I mean If there is one group I want to support it’s Unicyclers and Jugglers but will I pay that much for a uni never.
Posting your thoughts here and talking to other people about unicycling does more to support unicycling than paying big bucks for high end stuff. Starting a unicycle club or teaching someone how to ride also does much to support unicycling.
But if you want high end stuff, experimental stuff, cutting edge stuff, you will always pay big bucks for it. It costs alot to develop it. When the folks that make the high end stuff for you to buy sell alot of thousands of parts, then it is no longer cutting edge or experimental and that part of the cost goes away.
I agree,I made up my own MUni for 500canadian,with a migura brake and a
gazz,.it’s awesome.
KH for 1350 us ,that’s stupid.
“Sofa” <Sofa.6avda@timelimit.unicyclist.com> wrote in message news:Sofa.6avda@timelimit.unicyclist.com…
>
> What’s up with expensive unicycle hubs?!?
>
> An expensive bicycle hub? That’s understandable, what with the moving
> parts, bearings, seals, ect…
>
> But as far as I can tell, a uni hub is an a axle (that the cranks bolt
> onto) and two circles with holes in them (to put the spoke ends into)
> why the hell are they so expensive?
>
> Granted, Profile probably sells six uni hubs a year, but come on,
> $315us?!? Are they on crack? Not that I have any machines (or am good
> at anything) but these people that can make frames with their own tools
> must be able to make up something like a hub for $50, could they not?
>
> Ridiculous. Same as the Kris Holm half-a-bike (I say this because it
> sounds right in this argument) on Unicycle.com…outrageous. the KH24
> costs $1300 US! Here’s the breakdown as far as I can tell…
> 1) All the parts needed to make the uni (complete) - $250
> 2) Using 'The Famous Unicyclist’s name - $1050
>
>
> –
> Sofa - I brake for MUni
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Sofa’s Profile: http://www.unicyclist.com/profile/706
> View this thread: http://www.unicyclist.com/thread/18718
>
who’s doing 6foot drops??please show us some shots.
I’ve looked through alot of pic’s and very few guys are breaking there
unis, they must all be on high end bikes?if any ,or doing any bike breaking
stunts,you’d have to drive a truck over that 25buck hub to break it.
“sendhair” <sendhair.6awra@timelimit.unicyclist.com> wrote in message news:sendhair.6awra@timelimit.unicyclist.com…
>
> > -from Unicycle.com’s online catalog- *After he’d bent yet
> > another set of crank arms during the 1999 California Mountain Unicycle
> > Weekend, David Poznanter was anxious for an “unbreakable” hub and
> > crank assembly. Discussions with several manufacturers led to many
> > samples and field tests. David eventually decided that Profile could
> > best produce the kind of hub needed for hard trail rides with 5- and
> > 6-foot drops. After months of requirements gathering, testing,
> > reality checks and phone calls, Profile has produced one of the finest
> > hubs available for a unicycle. The axle is constructed of 4130
> > chromoly steel; the hub body is constructed of 6061 aluminum. Made in
> > the USA, lifetime warranty.
> >
> > Hub Specifications:
> >
> >
> > * 48-Spline
> > * 36-hole
> > * Axle diameter: 19.05-mm (3/4-inch)
> > * Weight 2 pounds
> >
> > *
>
> These are -racing- hubs. High perfomance -costs-, man. These guys
> did R&D to produce their product, and they naturally want to turn a
> profit. You don’t have to buy them… you can get Suzues for $20.
> You’d really scream if you knew what the retail markup on your computer
> was. Ya want a Porsche, ya pay Porsche prices. (Unless you can build
> one yourself)
>
> The main dif between bicycle hubs and unicycle hubs is the location of
> the bearings. Unicycle axles move, too. Oh, yeah; and with unicycles,
> you only need one.
>
>
> –
> sendhair - Dismember
>
> Rick
>
> ______________________________
> “Don’t pity me. Pity my creditors.” – James McNeill Whistler
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> sendhair’s Profile: http://www.unicyclist.com/profile/1019
> View this thread: http://www.unicyclist.com/thread/18718
>
I’m not. I just quoted that from Unicycle.com’s online catalog (as I wrote before). Maybe they have some pics. Seems to me a six-foot drop would break something a little more precious (ouch!) than a hub, but maybe those guys have upgraded (or replaced) ALL of their parts.
You dont have to be doing a six foot drop to break cranks on a uni! Try two foot and a dodgy landing!
Since ive started uni trials, ive gone through three sets of cranks, one of the Shimano xt, two of them monty trials cranks. Anyone in the bike trials world can tell you these cranks can stand a lot. Put them on a uni though and the stress is dramatically increased! Profile has been the only crank set thats stood up to it so far.
My cost,
about 650-700Aus dollars for the hub and crank set.
50 dollars worth of cromolly for my frame,
20 for the end caps.
Viscount seat and peddles taken from my old uni.
about 110 for duro 3inch tyre, rhinolite rim and spokes, built myself. old set of v brakes, free!
Comes out to 880, but id say it probably cost mu about 950 including welding rods, bolts etc.
Thats about 500 american, big saving from a professional, and its standing up well to 3-4 foot drops! Do the math, no more broken cranks. If you need it, buy it. Otherwise, stick to cheap parts and dont complain!
As for profile, i have only good things to say about them. Shame about the price though, but at least i wont have to buy another!
http://reeder.video.unicyclist.com/long.mpg
There’s a video there of a 6 foot drop for you.
If you want to whine about the cost of high performance stuff, that’s fine. Like all hobbies, sports or interests there’s always going to be that over-priced, over-rated item that you feel is a waste of money. Some people have money to waste, or have enough interest in unicycling to spend the $315 on a pair of Profiles. Profile was nice enough to put the time, money, and effort into designing this hub for us. The even better part is that they backed it up with a lifetime warranty. You can bitch about the price all you want, but the quality is there. You’d be suprised how many sets of Profiles are sold through unicycle.com each year, it’s a lot more than 6. And if you’re bitching about the $315 price tag, know that back in December or so the price on them was $350.
It seems that people feel that I was bitching about the cost of these things with the original post. I’m not looking for expensive things without paying the cost. I was merely curious as to HOW a slab of metal with some holes in it could be $315.
Hey, it’s a game we play. Let’s keep it friendly folks.
And now Mikefule goes off on a tangent:
I’m the first to agree that many items of technical sports equipment are overpriced if compared to other common goods. It’s the same in bicycling, scuba diving, climbing, kayaking and every other ‘extreme’ sport.
Take my Coker - it consists of 3 bits of metal tube brazed together, a seat post and a seat, a couple of bearings, a hub, some plain gauge spokes, cranks, pedals, a clamp - absolutely no clever engineering here, and nothing that couldn’t have been made in Victorian times (except for the specific alloys used) and for the same price I could have bought a Fastext TV, or a VCR, or a digital camera, or a fortnight’s trip to Cyprus, self catering.
BUT look at it a different way. The hub is made of alloy. The alloy is made of various metals and the mixture is the result of costly research. The metals have to be extracted from ores. The ores have to be dug up. The equipment needed to do this is costly. The manpower is costly. The energy used to produce a hub is substantial. The melting points of most metals are very high. Any casting that has to be done has to be done in carefully controlled conditions by skilled workers. Any machining has to be done by skilled workers using sophisticated equipment. Even the design isn’t as simple as might appear at first. Even the shape of the spoke holes can be critical - a cheap hub can cause spoke breakages very quickly.
This isn’t a technical lecture - just a remark that we are all damned lucky to live in a tiny window of opportunity in human history when ordinary people have the freedom to choose whether or not to own such an artefact. The bog standard hub on any one of my unicycles is wealth beyond the wildest dreams of people in my station in life only a few generations ago, and beyond the dreams of many millions of the world’s citizens today.
Nevertheless, I agree, anything much over a hundred quid for a hub sounds daft to me unless it’s gold plated or something.
The current price for a metric ton of aluminum, a key alloy in making profiles hubs, well I think it is at least is $750(US) for 1 metric ton.
Now take the weight of a profile hub, I dont have one so I’m not sure exactlly but I’m gonna guess it’s less than a lb. roughly .5kg thats a 2000 units thats less than $0.50 per unit I’m sure R and D get some of that extra money that goes into the hub but Im sure they use the same alloy in many other products besides Unicycle hubs, ie thier bike hubs too.
What’s yer point? It ain’t hamburger. It ain’t Play-Doh that yer just gonna squeeze through a plastic extruder. They don’t sell those little circles of plastic wrap called soft contact lenses by the pound, do they? What do they cost? I can get a roll of generic plastic wrap for what… 59cents? I think I’ll go into competition with Bausch and Lomb. Then, I’m gonna go smelt some aluminum in my back yard and pound a couple of holes in a slab of it with a big ol’ nail and make a unicyle hub. Pretty soon now, my rubber tree will be ready for tapping…
[qoute]
BUT look at it a different way. The hub is made of alloy. The alloy is made of various metals and the mixture is the result of costly research. The metals have to be extracted from ores. The ores have to be dug up. The equipment needed to do this is costly. The manpower is costly.[/B]
[/QUOTE]
> > -originally posted by Checkernuts:- The current price for a metric
> > ton of aluminum, a key alloy in making profiles hubs, well I think it
> > is at least is $750(US) for 1 metric ton… roughly .5kg that’s a 2000
> > units that’s less than $0.50 per unit…
And hey, aluminum is basically made out of dirt - cheap dirt, bauxite ore -
and electricity. No reason it should be so freaking expensive. Just make
your own.
Or melt down some used soda cans and make your own hub for free.
