Archive for the 'Unicycling' Category

Coker and Coke

I had an awesome time at the “California” muni weekend, hosted in Vancouver, BC, Canada, by the VanUni unicycling club and dubbed the Vancouver Muni Weekend. It was announced via the Unicyclist forums.

Here is a collection of pictures from Nathan Hoover on SmugMug. Here are some of the highlights that include me, and my notes so I can remember what I did and have one place to find all the links I’m interested in.

Friday we did an informal ride at the North Shore (Mt Fromme) on a trail called Ladies Only. Tim Lee got a picture of how Ladies have a double black diamond technical difficulty rating:

Here’s a video from Nathan:

Saturday we rode the CBC trail at Mt Seymour. Here’s me riding a skinny: (Photo by Nathan Hoover):

A picture from Facebook via Tim Lee:

One of my favorite movies from Nathan — a cool teeter totter:

Monday we went up to Squamish and road by the Alice Lake area. It rained lightly, but cleared up in the afternoon and was also a blast. Here’s a video of some of the scary stuff (from Nathan again!):

Tom Holub also put up some great Vancouver Muni Weekend pictures on flickr.

A youtube collection from Nick — lots of footage of Tom, Justin and An’So. I think I was ahead of them, as I didn’t get a chance to really ride with them on Saturday.

Last weekend when my cat disappeared I was busy having fun doing some mountain unicycling. I might as well remember the good stuff.

Saturday a group of us rode Mr Toads Wild Ride as a 13′ish mile shuttle. I think it was my fourth time riding this trail (hopefully by writing it on my blog I can keep track better). Here’s some info here on singletracks about the ride. It is one of my all time favorite rides in California. It is very taxing on the body, and tough to ride all the way up. This was my first time riding it on the geared 24 mountain unicycle, and it was totally fun to blast past the easy stuff towards the end — nice and curvy with a few bumps and tough parts mixed in every now and again.

Nathan got a great video of me doing an epic crash:

It hurt a bit, and I ended up bending the neck of my frame about 10 degrees back. I also bent my handlebar! On the ride: Aaron, Jason, Nathan, Geoff F., Bevan and myself. We carpooled up in double priuses.

On Sunday we rode “Hole in the Ground”. Bevan captured a map with his iPhone 4.

It was about 13 miles, with lots of up and down. It feels as though you are climbing the whole time. This ride was epic; it started hailing, then turned to light rain, and later was snowing a bit. Nathan had a good fall and hurt his shoulder and fingers a bit. John Foss also came for the fun. This was my second time riding the trail; I rode it last year at muni weekend; both times on my geared 24.

This weekend I’ll be going to Vancouver for some more epic unicycling at the “VanUni” muni weekend.

While in New Zealand, I broke the handlebar on my KH24. The thin tubing failed due to too much stress on the joint. The braze held up fine, and it broke right above it. While in NZ, I quickly re-welded it together (temporarily) with a MIG welder and a face shield that I totally couldn’t see out of. The result was a weld that held up for a few months..but that was about it. So, it finally broke again.

I cut the bad part off the handlebar part and ground some of the paint away. Notice the replacement tube in the right.

I took off the part that attaches to the seat post and ground off the junk:

The fix is a larger diameter tube that the regular one can slide into. It is thicker, and should make it last longer. I cut a 45 in the tube (NOTE after using it: 40 degrees, or less, would have been better):

After a few swipes of a 1/2 round file I had a fishmouth that fit perfectly:

I braze it together and powder coated it red:

The angle is a little too steep, but it works again!

I brought the tandem unicycle with me to Yosemite this past weekend weekend. I was hoping Louise and I would get a chance to ride it, but she was sick all weekend and it started raining/hailing/snowing. Luckily Scott Bond and I practice a bit before the storm set in. Here’s a shot video I made of the footage. Enjoy!

Click above for the large version, 37 MB, H.264 encoded.

Also available: Tandem Uni Practice – small version at 8 MB.

Also available on YouTube:

We did one of our favorite ride’s today, “Rob’s Ride”, with the famous Rob, Ken, Louise and myself. I dragged my camera around and took a few pictures.

Route: http://www.mapmyfitness.com/view_workout?w=810127162306730208

Not a pretty beast, and not easy to ride. It took me thee weeks of practice before I could ride it, and only after that could I “sort of” ride it. No free mounting or anything crazy like that. The balance point is just crazy difficult compared to a regular unicycle.

Here’s a video of me riding it on 1/31/2010:

I still plan to “shine it up” and build a small backrest. I originally wanted a nice large backrest, but I decided that it would hinder the ride ability of it.

Here’s the building process, which went together really fast (it is a hack):

Cut up a bike and figure out roughly where I wanted things:

All trial and error, with some guessing:

Weld a seat together out of some old bike tubes:

Weld it all together and cover the seat:

Hmm…not too elegant of “steps”.