I did not ever have fenders on my bike until I moved to Seattle.

Best thing I ever did.

Make sure you get full coverage fenders - either very long metal ones, or put a mud flap on the bottom.

In Seattle, they are especially important - it's not just the rain; it's the fact that half the year we ride on wet roads (even when it's not raining). With fenders on, you keep all the spray off your feet and lower legs.

The rear fender will keep the rear wheel from throwing crap into the bb area and under the saddle and make you popular with anyone who is following you.

Adding extensions to fenders is not hard to do... plastic milk jugs are a good source of material and I have also used the tongues out of old leather shoes and boots.

The leather fenders skirts on my Trek say "Nike".

If the mud flap on the front fender is 1" from the ground, its perfect. The length of the rear fender should depend upon how polite you are to other riders, the longer, the more polite you are.

But riding without fenders in the rain is pretty disgusting. It will ruin good shoes and throw oily, dirty water onto you. Light rain can actually be pretty nice on a summer day but oily water from the road is gross.

the "spray" isn't just water and the solids and semi solids have a bad habit of flying weirdly. also if your wheel is anything to the left or right then these items will fly up onto your water bottle and body and maybe even as high as your face. imagine overflowing storms drains (and human waste); animal feces; road kill; small bits of auto parts and motor oil etc getting flung at you. some days i am so filthy wuth disgusting grunge that I wish I had fenders.

My home-made mud flap has "Skil" printed on it.

I made it out of a piece of the case from a saw that died. It's perfect.

Fenders; because it's probably urine:

No. If you have caliper brakes and/or short rear stays (like most road bikes), it's going to be hard to fit traditional fenders. You can get "race blade" type fenders for road bikes, though. In addition, it helps to have dropouts (eyelets) to mount the fenders on your forks and rear stays. Without these, you can still mount them with p-clips or some other kind of adapter, but it's better if your frame has dropouts.

I'm sure tire width makes a difference. But I did get stuff sprayed into my face on my 25 mms. Didn't want to repeat the experience...

Regarding whether you can fit fender, similar to the Planet Bike SpeedEZ, you can also get the SKS Raceblade fenders -
https://www.sks-germany.com/sks.php?l...t&i=5289300000



Unlike the Planet Bike ones (I believe) the SKS's now come with a mudguard -



If you're really serious about fenders, I've also seen split full coverage fenders that simply split where the fork is so they work on bikes without enough clearance for fenders. I don't have a link offhand though, unfortunately.

I have a rack on my bike and it does the job of the back fender for me - rode home the other night right after it rained, when I arrived home the rack (and the rack bag on it) had some grit on them, but my back was totally clean. My legs (with no front fender) just looked a tiny bit dirty until I took off my socks - it looked like I had a serious tan line. Just from the grit (washed my legs and no "tan line" left whatsoever).

Fenders are something a mixed bag - on my winter bike I've had serious issues with noise (aluminum fenders, though), the fender coming loose (some loctite fixed it once I figured it out), and in riding in the snow the fenders made the snow spray from the tire worse - snow built up on the inside of the fender, then the tire eventually starts rubbing against it and completely covered my lower body in snow.

But I just bought a pair for my rain bike (the SKS's mentioned above) after the "tan line" thing.

I feel much cleaner after a long ride, even when it's dry, when I ride a bike with fenders as opposed to a bike without fenders.

I've ruined a couple pairs of white socks that way. Thought about getting gaiters and seeing if I could cinch 'em down enough to cover running shoes, but on wet days I just wear high top boots under the rain pants and haven't ruined any socks since.

Have a look at these fenders. The setup is similar to yours. https://velo-orange.com/fenders.html I run fenders on my 82 Fuji with side-pull brakes and a fairly narrow road-bike fork. I suspect 45mm fender might even work, but you can get 35mm too.

Completely necessary. It's not just the rainwater washing over the roadway, it's also about the puddles. OR lakes, or rivers of water. The volume of water that a tire displaces up and into one's face, and into one's shoes, and soaking through every layer you have on (even waterproof) is truly amazing. And the stuff that's not water? Grit, sand, rocks, bits of pavement, oil, diesel, organic debris...in your mouth? All over your bike? Seriously, fenders rock. Even when it's dry I have bits of stuff all over my legs with fenders.

Uh...not sure what to say to the guy above's post. If he's getting water soaking through his raingear, he needs new raingear. But fenders won't protect you from getting wet if it's raining. They won't even protect your feet from getting wet if you ride fast through a big puddle. The last sentence is why fenders sometimes legimately aren't used - if you're going to get wet and somewhat dirty anyways, how much of a difference is there between a little dirty and really dirty? You may well have to wash your clothes either way.

That being said, they significantly reduce (but not eliminate) the amount of road grit and water your bike tire throws up at you.

Here's a pic of the "tan line" effect I got on my foot from riding *after* it stopped raining -


It does, it totally looks like a tan line. But I assure you - having washed my leg, I have *absolutely* no sock tan line *whatsoever*. :-) And that's not even from riding in the rain! Or in the spring when there's still stuff on the road - that's from riding 2 weeks ago (in August) *after* it stopped raining!

Fenders aren't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but they do protect you from a ton of the stuff on the road (sand, salt, *other nasty things* that have mixed with the water on the road). When you get by rain, it's just water. When you get wet from spray off the wheel, it's got a whole bunch of other crap in it, and good fenders can protect you from like 90% of it.

PaulRivers where are you from? I have good raingear and sure, it does last at first, but in heavy, heavy downpour it can still get soaked through. Of course fenders won't "prevent you from getting wet." Duh. My point is that it prevents volumes of water from spraying into your face and into the important bike parts - the amount of grit and oil and other stuff on the road is not good for the bike nor do I recommend ingesting it. I personally don't like having a steady stream of water (and other stuff) projecting at my frontside and bike at speed for my 20 mile commute. I can't prevent the raindrops but the roostertail I can.

Plastic gallon size anti-freeze bottles are also a good source of plastic for mud flaps.