When I started riding to work about 5 years ago, Melbourne was in the middle of a decade long drought. At the time, I fitted fenders to my commuter, but being a bit more of a fairweather rider, I never really got a chance to use them.
However, 2012 has been a somewhat different from prior years, with Australia being declared as drought free for the first time in a decade. Of course, this didn’t really put me off riding my bike, because as far as I’m concerned, it’s all about being prepared.
There is however, one thing which I REALLY don’t like about riding in the wet – wet feet.
Sure, I had fenders and shoe covers, but my feet still ended up soaking wet on my ~60 minute ride to work. Some research led me to learn that I needed a mudflap on my front fender, so I set about knocking one together out of bits I scrounged from around the garage – and here’s the result…
Bolts from a set of Shimano SPD-SL cleats.
Holding in a strip of rubber. To stop the rubber tearing, the SPD-SL cleat washer is used with nyloc nuts.
And it all comes together to look like this.
It’s a bit flappy and flexible, plus causes some toe-overlap, however based on a couple of wet rides, I’m actually very pleased with the result.
