Originally Posted by
noglider
[MENTION=21724]cyccommute[/MENTION], I love how your perspective is based in deep experience but comes up with an unusual conclusion. More power to you. My rough guess is that fenders reduce water and grit by two thirds. If your hope was for them to eliminate that stuff perfectly, you were set up for disappointment. If 2/3 improvement isn't much to you, that explains why they're useless to you. In a long heavy downpour, I'll get totally drenched with or without fenders, but I don't encounter them often, and I don't head out into them deliberately. But there's no question they keep me and my bike cleaner than a lack of fenders does.
Do the fenders
really do the job you think they do? Go take a look at the bikes in the thread I linked to. There's a bike there with panniers on it that are covered with grit, so what do the fenders do? There's another bike that shows a bottom bracket covered in crap, so what do the fenders do? There's alan s' bike with sand all over it from riding on the C&O in the rain and about the other part of it that is clean is a tiny patch below the top tube/seat tube junction. Is that
really an important part to keep clean? Would it really be any cleaner without fenders?
And, finally, take a look at my bike. It's as clean as the others and it had been ridden in a day of rain on dirt roads about a week before the picture was taken. It's not exactly a dirty bike. And I swear that I had not washed the bike prior to the picture. Any dirt and crap falls off when it dries.