this may be an utterly ridiculous proposition, but a friend and i were wondering if it’s been done, and if so, how commonly?
while i’m on the subject of stupid notions, another argument was whether an ultimate giraffe (a giraffe with the seatpost removed) would be physically possible to ride.
i would appreciate shed light, and am partial to a request to take my stupid notions elsewhere.
the closest thing to wheelwalking an ultimate wheel I’ve ever heard is a guy who learned to ride an ultimate wheel with his hands, in a handstand.
as for the ultimate giraffe…I think it would be possible. people ride the giraffe with seat in front, but that would still be easier, because you can hold the seat for stability. it’d be sooper hard to balance an ultimate giraffe, but possible, I think…
i was thinking it might help if the giraffe was geared so it was equivalent to riding an ultimate wheel with the pedals at equivalent height.
handstand… that’s pretty damn impressive. would it be easier than walking? the hands help to grip the wheel, but surely that’s cancelled out by the whole inverted orientation and the strain on the arms.
feel free to use this for your own ideas/queries, people.
i’m betting it is possible for both, just really insanely hard.
Evan Byrne can wheelwalk a BC, but it’s kind of different…
He keeps one foot on the plate and pushes with the other foot.
That’s completly different though.
I have seen Julien Monney seat in front wheel walk with the seat pretty far away from his body, that’s pretty close to wheel walking an uw.
I really don’t think it would be possible to ride a giraffe ultimate wheel. Riding a giraffe with the seat in front isn’t too hard, but you need to keep a tight grip on the seat. Seat in back is possible, but it’s really hard, because you have to lean far forward and still keep a very tight hold on the seat. I can tell when I’m riding my giraffe seat out that if I let go of the seat for an instant, the whole assembly would be slammed into the ground. On a giraffe ultimate, I don’t see how you could get any leverage in order to speed up or slow down, so I don’t think it would be possible to make normal balance corrections. If you weren’t perfectly balanced for the least instant, you would lose your balance completely.
No it isn’t. Ride a giraffe seat in front. Then suddenly let go of the seat. Oops. Or do Julien’s trick above (which I’ve done, but surely not as well as him). Let go of the seat and the rules change drastically!
Riding an ultimate giraffe would be like riding a unicycle on a plain old set of bike rollers, only much, much harder. You need a third point of contact with the vehicle to keep the frame vertical, or it just won’t be.
This was an old argument we used to have with IUF founder Jack Halpern. Always the optimist, he contended it was possible. Now if you dig, you may find out Jack was the first person to ride a stacked two-wheeled unicycle. That was pretty hard at the time, but nobody considered it impossible.
So I’ll agree it’s possible as soon as someone does it.
Without cheating.
That being the case, you should be able to wheel-walk an ultimate wheel, depending how much cheating you will accept. How wide can the tire be? 
Cue: optimistic outlook
I’d say the ultimate giraffe is technically possible. Riding seat to front on a giraffe and letting go isn’t an entirely fair comparison, as the giraffe is already on an angle when you ride SIF. It’s going to be prone to falling foward anyway. I’d tend to assume that if you ride Seat Behind, and let go, you’ll fall backwards - is this a fair assumption? I’m not suggesting anyone going out and trying, but if anyone can pipe in with an experience here it’d be appreciated.
A fairer comparison would be setting the saddle to a “too low to sit on easily” height, letting go of the seat, and trying to ride standing up. Though, that’s cheating, the saddle would rub against your legs 
All I gotta say, is I don’t want to be the one falling off an ultimate giraffe while seeing if it is indeed possible 
I’d suggest a 3-wheel-stacked ultimate might be a better idea, as the basic concept of it would be the same, and in a pinch, leg rubbing on the wheel to save yourself is a possiblity. But I’m completely inexperienced both in the regards of ultimate wheels and stacked wheels, so it’s probably best to ignore my thoughts on this matter
Just to clarify that handstand that James Potter mentioned: it is done on the pedals, not on the wheel. See http://www.xs4all.nl/~klaasbil/stamps.htm for a picture and some details.
As to the original question: I think that wheelwalking an UW is less impossible than riding an ‘ultimate giraffe’. It is also less dangerous! But both skills would be excruciatingly hard!
of course, this doesn’t necessarily have to be a standard 5’ giraffe or anything. i was just wondering if the balance worked if the pedals weren’t the centre of gravity.
…which gives rise to another idea. eccentric uw?
oh, and thanks for the feedback, everyone.
thats a new one… someone’s gonna try that eventually…
what do you mean by eccentric UW?
Chase
ultimate wheel with off center hub and/or pedals that aren’t even.
how about…a kangaroo Ultimate Wheel?
someone’s gonna try that too…
that’s an interesting concept though.
A kangaroo UW might be easier than the regular kind. Sort of. None of that tire-scraping-leg-hairs-off thing.
An eccentric one shouldn’t be too difficult.
But mounting it would be another issue. Another interesting notion would be a geared eccentric recumbent kangaroo coker giraffe. I can’t imagine anyone being able to ride it, though. 
If the UW was made from a car wheel, it would be very possible.
In that case, I have wheel walked a UW made out of a tractor tire, but there were no pedals…and no rim…just a tire:) I rode inside of it once too.
I can hop on a wheel if that were the case and wheelwalk, but seriously if it were on something like a very low pressure muni tire I think it could be pretty possible.
yes, but it still is physically possible to do it on a regular sized uni wheel.
i’m betting you that if someone were really devoted to it, and trained and trained and trained for a few years to a lifetime on end, it could be done.