Thursday, April 30, 2009

Heck of a day for fender failure

It's rained more this week than I can imagine. The roads are finally getting flushed of the build-up sand, salt, and sludge, but in its wake remains a healthy layer of water, and the rain just keeps falling.

Of course, today had to be the day that my front fender bit the dust:


I've had to patch up my rear fenders a few times. The front one was, until now, holding up. This is the nail in the coffin for SKS fenders. I'm not sure why the front one failed. I could have damaged it during Monday's crash and it may have finally split all the way through this morning, so I'm not laying the blame squarely on SKS. When I get the funds, I'll replace these with Planet Bike Cascadia fenders. I've heard nothing but good things about them from other commuters, and I look forward to the longer mudflaps on the Cascadia.

From a few days ago. Park Tool makes my favorite bicycle tools, and they know what matters. Built-in bottle opener as found on the Park MTB-3.


A friend of mine pointed out that I'm using a bottle opener on a twist-off cap in the above photo. I honestly don't even bother looking at beer bottle caps anymore. Some of the ones I buy twist off. Others do not. They all open with a bottle opener, though. Whilst grilling supper and cleaning The Twelve off on the one nice afternoon Mother Nature graced us with this week, a nice, cold Boulevard Wheat was the perfect complement.

6 comments:

The Unabashed Blogger said...

Context: Sometimes I splurge and get a new 6 pack I've never tried before; I also am a homebrewer.

Couple weeks ago I excitedly went to open a new donor bottle full of beer and searched, and searched, and searched for my bottle opener that was not in it's spot! 10 minutes later I finally found it, popped the top, poured, rinsed the bottle and doh! It was a twist off. Sheesh.

Noah said...

Unabashed: Heh.

The Unabashed Blogger said...

Hah! I like it. Looks Mad Max-ish. You could use the rest of the ring to make more and sell em or, using the Mad Max reference, mount them to your helmet. Now that I'd like to see. Commuter Hell

Darius said...

You can fix that... silicone, some rivets, a piece of plastic...maaybe from a detergent bottle and wala... you have a fender again.

I have the planet Bike Cascadias... love em.

AJ said...

I have stainless steel Gilles Berthoud fenders, still going strong after nearly two years and maybe 7000 miles. Perhaps they wouldn't look right on your bike, but you might want to check out the aluminum and steel fenders that Velo Orange is creating and distributing.

Love the blog, btw!

Noah said...

I gave up on "looks" a long time ago. I got to thinking metal fenders wouldn't look too bad either. The back half of my bike is clearcoat over raw brushed aluminum.

Privacy Policy

This site is driven by software that uses third-party cookies from Google (Blogger, AdSense, Feedburner and their associates.) Cookies are small pieces of non-executable data stored by your web browser, often for the purpose of storing preferences or data from previous visits to a site. No individual user is directly tracked by this or any other means, but I do use the aggregate data for statistics purposes.

By leaving a link or e-mail address in my comments (including your blogger profile or website URL), you acknowledge that the published comment and associated links will be available to the public and that they will likely be clicked on.