Fenders For Your Bicycle
If you are a "fair weather" cyclist, you don't need fenders, but if you are a serious cyclist, and don't live in a desert climate, you really should have at least one bicycle with fenders.Fenders by themselves won't keep you dry in a pounding rain, but they make a tremendous difference when you are riding roads that are wet from drizzle, recent rain, or snow-melt.
Even in hard rain, you will become wet with clean rain from above, but your body and bicycle will be protected from the mud and sand kicked up from dirty puddles and rivulets.
Rain capes.*****
Many cyclists protect themselves from rain by wearing rubber clothing, but they forget that their bicycles don't like dirty water any better than their bodies do.The water kicked up by your wheels is much worse for your bicycle than the clean rain falling from the sky. If you ride in wet conditions without fenders your chain, derailers and brakes will all get sprayed with sandy, muddy, scummy water, often mixed with gasolene residue. This is very bad for these parts.
Even more vulnerable is the lower section of your headset. Headsets are designed to shed water like the shingles of a roof, and are basically rainproof...but the gritty spray from below has easy entry to the bearing surfaces of the heavily-loaded lower races.
There is no substitute for full-length fenders, such as ESGE or the better Zéfal or Delta models. The rears run from the chainstays all around the rear tire until they are pointing almost straight down at the back. The good ones have two pairs of stays (wire struts) to hold the rear part in position, and also attach to the seatstay and chainstay bridges. The corresponding front tires extend from about 6 inches in front of the fork down well below the "equator" of the front wheel, again with stays. Ideally, the front shoud also be equipped with a mudflap to protect your feet from spray.This traditional fender really works to protect you and your bicycle from spray kicked up by wet roads.
The clip-ons are slightly better than nothing, but very much worse than real fenders.
Unfortunately, many newer bicycles are poorly designed, following silly fads that make it difficult or impossible to install real fenders. These bikes are designed for fair weather use, and are not intended for serious cyclists. This is particularly true of racing or racing-style bikes, which often are made without frame eyelets to attach the fender stays to, and with insufficient clearance under the brake bridges and calipers to allow fenders to clear the tires. If you are stuck with such a bike, clip-ons may be your only option.
Fenders don't extend down as far as they might for maximum protection, because the ends would be vulnerable to damage from curbs and the like. Instead, flexible extensions called "mud flaps" are a valuable addition. A suitable mud flap will extend spray protection all the way down to your feet.Triangular rubber mud flaps were formerly a standard accessory item, but they have become hard/impossible to find. These flaps are a bit heavy and stiff for mounting on modern plastic fenders anyway.
Many rain-savy cyclists make their own mud flaps for plastic fenders out of plastic milk/cider jugs, commonly secured by "pop" rivets or small screws and nuts.
Alex Wetmore has a Web page on do-it-yourself mud flaps.
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