Hey, folks. I've got an old mountain bike that's been turned into a city bike, and I'm pretty pleased so far. I put SKS Longboards on at the beginning of the winter, and they surprisingly fit fairly well – except for the front fork mounting.

I think that the MTB fork is proportioned so it can be replaced with a suspension fork, and is longer than strictly necessary: my front fender does the whole 'point-at-the-sky' thing at the front. I tried the Fender Flute thing but it was far too wide for the inside of the fork.

Can anyone suggest a piece of hardware that I can use to get that sucker further down? I'm picturing probably a long slotted bracket that's narrow enough to fit into the fork crown (either before or after filing/grinding down), but I'm not sure where to look.

I made a DIY piece to handle this on a Muirwoods 29er I used to have.



This was made from a standard T-bracket I got at the local hardware store covered with black duct tape and a couple of reflector mounting brackets. This depended a bit on being able to push the bracket pretty far up into the fork crown, but if you can't do that you might be able to just cut a piece off of it.

Nice. I don't need quite so much space, which is the problem I've found with the hardware store stuff I've found so far - all the holes are located pretty far apart, like 1.5"+ centers, when I need maybe another ½" to 1" extension to get it down reasonably far.

I've only tried big-box stores so far, though - I'll try some smaller shops and maybe an LBS to see if they've got some spare bits.