One Wheel and Change: A saga of optimism, pain, wilful ignorance of the future, motion and heroic tenacity.
Gather round, friends, and let me tell you a tale. A tale of coveting and satisfaction. A tale of glory and pain and tenacity. Of wonder and disappointment and overcoming.
The year was 2014. Through what must surely have been divine intervention, an unlikely series of events conspired to ensure that my consciousness became enduringly aware of an object of wonder; a device so inspired, so perfectly aligned to my deepest desires, preferences, wants and needs that fate itself could not have better manipulated the universe to a more sublime outcome.
I spotted a thing that I liked, a lot, on the internet. Through the eternal mysteries of the universe (and social media ad targeting), I saw this thing on Kickstarter that I could not live without. I had to have it.
However! Calamity! Friends, as you surely must know, I am deeply skeptical of all things Kickstarter. Too many stories of woe, angst and disappointment surround that platform and the many hairbrained schemes that it supports like a malevolent kettle of vultures circling the carcasses of a lightning-storm slain herd of deer.
So, what to do? Invest a considerable sum in a Kickstarter fantasy? No, dear friends, that is not me. That is not who I am. Instead, I would be patient. I would wait to see if the project took off before deciding to hand over a great many of my very hard earned dollars. And take off it did! It turned into a true Kickstarter success story. The Onewheel, arguably the greatest personal transport and electrified gnar shredding solution the universe had ever known, became a commercially successful business.
And so it came to pass that in the year of our Lord 2017, I travelled to a far land across the ocean and while there doing business things, I visited a friend and ex-colleague at his new place of regular employment in Portland, Oregon. As fate would have it, this friend of mine worked with another deeply visionary individual who had, in fact, invested in the Onewheel Kickstarter and actually owned one such amazing device. It was then that I was introduced first-hand to this mechanical wonderwork, this masterpiece of ideation and engineering. Tim — friend, ex-colleague, ex-boss-man — showed me the Onewheel in his office and allowed me to try and ride it. Horrendously difficult as it turns out, that first try without instruction.
My burning need to possess this device, thusly and firmly cemented in my psyche, I returned from my travels and once more browsed to the internet property of the creators of the Onewheel only to discover that the second version of this glorious gadget was nearing completion. Sweet perfection! Precisely aligned with all that is good and pure and my personality defects: the second version of a commercially successful product with the rough edges smoothed.
It was at this time that the tiniest of doubts blossomed in my mind. Future Motion Inc, the company that invented and manufactures the Onewheel, who would soon be selling the Onewheel+, was located in California, US of A. Any exercise of the warranty on the magic electric hoverboard I was compelled to acquire would likely require shipping the board around the planet.
“If I had to get the Onewheel repaired…fuckit, if there are going to be any problems”, I casually and recklessly thought, and quite frankly had no reasonable basis to suspect that there would be, “they will totally be future-me’s problem”. “I must have that machine right now”, my brain violently insisted.
With great excitement I placed an order for a Onewheel+. There was desire to fulfil. I coveted it and I was going to have it. Eight weeks later, as it turned out, was when I when I was going to have it. The Onewheel+ order backlog was 8, terribly long, painfully slow, tortuous weeks.
On the 8th of August 2017 I received my very own magic marvel machine from Future Motion in San Jose, CA.
I quickly discovered that the learning curve for riding the Onewheel is, if I’m going to be honest, quite steep. Starting a ride and getting the motor engaged is tricky at first, balancing and steering takes a bit of getting used to and dismounting is a bit of a dark art. It’s also a good thing that, as Future Motion accurately claims, the Onewheel is built like a tank because it takes an unholy beating when you’re learning. You, too, take an unholy beating as it turns out…but wounds heal. Mostly. I’ll get into that.
Once you can actually ride the magic wonder mechanism, it is pretty amazing. It really is a lot like what you imagine the Back To The Future hoverboard to be like. It’s like the board reads your mind; you don’t even really need to think, it just does what you want. Which, as it turns out, is more dangerous than it sounds. There are some…nuances to riding that aren’t very obvious when you first set out which are learned through painful trial and error. One, for example, does not want to be surprised by bumps in the road. While the Onewheel is reasonably stable, unexpected bumps cause wobbles that get out of hand rapidly. You really very badly want to anticipate those bumps while riding at any speed. Another thing one gets very good at very quickly is judging the height of ledges. Head on, the Onewheel comes to a pretty abrupt stop if the step you’re trying to roll up is more than about 10cm. You really don’t want that. The point I’m trying to make is that riding a Onewheel focuses the mind through painful necessity because coming off of a Onewheel hurts a lot.
Between August 2017 and August 2018 I rode my board 1100 glorious kilometers. In that time I had three incidents that involved bleeding. The first was getting run over by a sprinting pedestrian causing me to fall with my hip onto a concrete edge putting me on crutches and painkillers for two weeks feeling like I was pissing blood and being knifed by dwarves. The second was misjudging a corner and scratching my face on pavement. The third was an oblivious taxi driver opening his oblivious taxi door on me while I was cruising up a cycle lane. The number of non-bleeding incidents is quite large but have tapered off somewhat since proceeding past my five hundredth kilometer at pace. That learning curve man…it’s steep and asphalt is a harsh teacher. It’s a bit like skateboarding, except, I’m old now.
Which brings me to a bit of a quandary. On one hand, the machine that is the Onewheel is magnificent. I love it and I love riding it. I wish I could afford the third version — Onewheel XR — which has a much longer range that I very much wish I had. On the other hand, Future Motion Inc. who make the wonderful Onewheel have appalling customer support. Maybe it’s just me. But since I’ve had two issues that I tried to get some help with and since I had a pretty terrible time on both occasions, maybe it isn’t just me.
The first issue I had was with the way that the iPhone app reported battery status and estimated remaining range. For some reason, as time went by, the battery percentage at which the battery was actually flat, went up. For example today, the battery would be flat at 5%, tomorrow at 10% and by the end of the week, it would die at 90%. The battery percentage in the app would not reduce as you rode however, so it wasn’t precisely a battery issue but more the way the charge remaining was reported. I tried to get some info out of Future Motion which, when I finally got a response from them and after a couple of rounds of messaging turned into a: “Send the board back so we can check it out. Bro.”
Sure. Except it would cost me somewhere around one and a half kidneys, two children or $500 to ship the board there and back. Expensive way to deal with warranty but this is the bed that I made. Past me, meet future me. Totally justified by the creative problem solving it inspired…
Turns out that when the charge reporting gets out of sync, if you run the battery down completely to 0% and the board switches off, it resets whatever is wrong, and the charge reporting works fine again for a while, until it starts to degrade again. An update to the iPhone app also seemed to have made the issue somewhat less of an issue at one point. Anyway, I managed to figure out a solution on my own that I could live with which was great.
After many hours of sick gnar shredding like a boss, mostly not getting injured and a thousand kilometers, I had done the inevitable and worn the tire out. Future Motion provides a tire change service at the low low price of $99, which would be an outstanding deal if only it didn’t come with a $500 shipping cost to transport the board all the way to San Jose and back. I tried to get some info from Future Motion as to what my options might be outside of that, which took them just under a month to respond to and their response was, I paraphrase: “You’re shit out of luck, son. Send the board, there are no other options, something something calibration”. Ok, but I like having kidneys though.
Changing the tire on a Onewheel, from New Zealand, turned out to be quite the tricky ordeal if you’re a cheapskate like yours truly. Nobody (that I could find) in New Zealand stocks the size of go kart tire that fits (11.5×6.5–6). I’m still not sure how to buy the appropriate Vega brand tire — the default on the board — and it turns out that Hoosier, a different manufacturer, has distribution agreements in place. That means that the first tire I ordered online for delivery to New Zealand was cancelled by the vendor with a “sorry, can’t deliver to NZ mate, have a refund”. It was the most un-American thing I’ve ever experienced. Second try was successful and I managed to get a Hoosier tire delivered from a nice company in Ohio, US of A.
Some useful facts to know if this is a thing you’re contemplating doing: disassembling the board to the point where you can remove the hub isn’t that hard. You definitely need a ⅛ inch and a ¼ inch allen key — ¼ inch is not a standard size allen key in a metric set — and a smallish phillips screwdriver. You also definitely need to know that uncoupling the large and small rectangular cable connector plugs require pulling out the white tab and pressing down on the black piece that the white tab was under until you hear a click, which then allows you to pull the plug out. The round wire plugs for the motor and the front footpad need you to twist the front round bit counter clockwise a quarter turn until it clicks and then pull the plug backwards. A mere dozen, dozen and a half screws and you can pull the wheel out and you start to think: “this is so easy I’m obviously a mechanical genius”.
Where getting the wheel out of the frame can be done by mere children however, getting the tire off the hub takes fucking tiger blood and hate. With gardening gloves on my soft (yet powerful) programmer hands, I gripped, pushed and choked that black band of rubber like it just ate my firstborn child. Summoning power from a place of desire and need that can only be created by the most beloved of machines, in just a couple of short hours, several rest breaks and how-to YouTube videos later I gave a shrill scream of triumph as the tire unseated. On the one side. Choking back tears of frustration and with a primordial battle-cry I attacked the other side, desperately clawing at the tire like a honey badger fighting a dirty black lion. That is round. I threw myself into that mortal battle as if it was for my very life! Nearing complete exhaustion, sweat pouring from my brow, the stench of window cleaner and rubber thick in the air, finally the mighty adversary was defeated! It gave way, like the catastrophic failing of the final strut in an imperiled bridge. An heroic effort! I marvelled at the sheer might and power I had just unleashed on this terrible foe!
It turns out window cleaner is a pretty good lubricant to both get the tire off and back on. If you decide to change your own Onewheel tire, I strongly suggest having some around. Getting the new tire on, while not exactly easy, is nowhere near as hard as getting the old one off. Reassembling the board is also pretty straightforward and if the front foot pad doesn’t work when you’ve got it all done, unplug the lot and plug the footpad in first followed by the the rest with the battery cable last. I’m surprised you read to the end. Thanks!
