Black like my bike, black like my brothers, black like my new fenders!
Yup, put them on this morning—the fenders. Now, I’m not much of a mechanic, and I was stumped for a while where the front one would be attached—I did not see a convenient hole on my bike where the installation diagram showed one.
But the diagram is from the folks at the after-market company that make the fenders, and they’re not familiar with my bike. Luckily, in another nearby location, I found the hole I was looking for, through which I could install a bolt.
Then, when I put the bolt in, it ran into my front brake, which doesn’t seem like a good idea. The one clear point in the installation instructions is to ensure that your cheap plastic new mud guards DO NOT INTERFERE WITH YOUR BRAKES (or don’t sue us because we tried, you nincompoops.) Yeah, I always wanted to pen product warning labels. Anyway, if I reverse the bolt, so it sticks out away from the brake, would that work?
So far, it seems to.
The back fender was a bit more complex to install since it involves a brace that embraces my bike seat shaft, or whatever they call the metal pole that holds the bike seat. The fender folks anticipated some complexity here, because there were several rectangular shaped pieces of flexible plastic included with the fenders—shims, I assumed, and the smaller shim worked.
Still, all in all, installing both fenders turned out to be a not very time-consuming ordeal. And now I should be slightly more protected from splashes when I ride in slight damp or through a puddle.
Given the dry, unusually warm weather we’re having, it may be some time before I can test this technology’s effectiveness.
I’ll gladly wait. I don’t mind unusually great biking weather so early in March! And when the damp returns, I’m ready with my fenders on.
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