Wow. I got my “20-inch Kris Holm”:http://www.krisholm.com/products/ today. It’s absolutely off-the-hook. I went out on campus for about an hour, because I was meeting up with some people for dinner, and it was a totally incredible experience. All of a sudden I can jump about 50% higher, meaning I can climb a picnic table (bench to top) with the seat in (usually you have to pull the seat out in front of you to get more height), and I can pedal climb stuff almost as high as my waist.

It has this freakin’ huge street tire on it, and it lets you pretty much balance forever. It feels so stable when you’re jumping on stuff. It’s still a bit more squirrely when you’re just riding along, because the wheel is a bit twitchy, but I think with the bigger tire, my balance beam abilities are about the same on it. Needless to say, if you see a guy with a big grin on his face, on a blue 20 inch unicycle out on campus in the next couple weeks, that’s me alright, being insane, or breaking something trying….

It came just in time, because this weekend I was doing a bit of unicycle-trials construction, which I just finished. About a month ago, I found “these plans”:http://www.handlebarsandwich.com/file_upload/building.doc on a site by the name of “Unicycling Tips and Tutorials”:http://www.freewebs.com/andrewcarter/freestyle.htm. It’s by a dude named Andrew Carter. Unfortunately, the site appears to be pretty popular, so it’s down right now (hopefully he doesn’t mind that I uploaded the document to my site for all to see). But, either way, I decided this weekend to do a bit of construction, and I now have 2 “sandwich boards” and a 16-foot long, movable balance beam (1.5 inches wide, think 2×4 piece of wood on end). I can ride the balance beam on my 24 inch if I have something to stabilize myself to start, and can ride about 1/2 way down if I start on the rail with no support. I haven’t tried it yet on the 20 inch, but you can bet I will soon……

Stay tuned for pictures, and possibly some movies of the insanity as it progresses further…

In the meantime, I uploaded a “video of Kai riding his unicycle on CNN”:http://www.handlebarsandwich.com/file_upload/Kai_CNN_Video_8_05.asf for everyone to peruse. It’s about 5mb, so the high-speed connection warning applies. It’s a few minutes of his allotted 15 of fame.