Return (and Returning?) of the Guni

Back in October, my geared unicycle began having problems. On several occasions it slipped out of geared (once causing a scary fall), but worse still was the related fact that one of the crank arms was falling off. I emailed Florian and spoke with him a few times in Switzerland, and I tried repairing things on my own and with the help of fellow NYUC club member (and fellow guni owner) Dave Bagley, but finally we realized that there was no way to fix this unicycle's hub.

Florian had been working on an improved hub at this time, so rather than trying to fix my hub or sending me a replacement, he generously decided to give updated hubs to all owners of 1st generation hubs. These newer models have 12 internal pins rather than 6, and this means that the hub can switch into gear more smoothly. It took nearly six months for the updated hub to arrive, and it finally showed up last week [Florian had broken his arm and had gone to Laos on a unicycle tour, adding to the delay.]

Once the hub arrived, I tried to rebuild the wheel (putting all of the spokes back on the rim), but my two attempts failed. Rebuilding a wheel is a Zen art, and I'm not even a Zen grasshopper when it comes to truing a wheel, let alone building one from scratch. So I paid a bike mechanic $35 for the job, and, as of Wednesday afternoon, was on my way. Sure enough, the shifting was nearly seamless. I was able to make transitions from low to high gear and back with little difficulty. I rode it to Brooklyn and back to my mom's apartment on the Upper West Side (a trip of about 8.5 miles each way) twice, logging a total of about 36 miles on it until just an hour ago when I realized that one of the crank arms is loose.

The loose arm is on the downshift-button side. That is the same thing that happened to me last time, if I'm not mistaken. Luckily for me, a fellow member of the NYUC also has a guni from Florian, so he may be able to fix this when I see him tomorrow. If not, I'll have to disassemble the wheel again (that's a lot easier than building it!) and send the newer hub back to Switzerland.