Last year I bought my wife the Betty demo bike as they were going out of production. Of course it came as a complete package, including fenders. When I put it together, it took me a long time to get the fenders to fit around the 40 mm tires. Today I pulled the bike out of the basement for Pat and tried to get it ride ready for the season and again found myself struggling with the front fender. The rear is easy, the front a bear. This time I put a caliper on the fenders and discovered they were only 45 mm wide. No wonder I'm not getting them to run smoothly. I assume ( ?? ) the number on a pair of SKS fender refers to the fender width and that these are cream colored SKS 45 fenders. So what to do? Replace the fenders or the tires?
The RBW site recommends the P50 with these tires but that also seems pretty tight, with just 5mm clearance on each side. Should I go to the P55? Also I have never liked the flexibility of plastic fenders and am suspicious of fenders that are recommended for 700, 650, & 26 tires at the same time. VO offers Al. fenders that are just 52 mm wide which also seems to small. Peter White recommends a minimum of 18 mm between the tire size and the fender size for metal, and my experience confirm the wisdom of this. This brings me to Honjos from Jitensha or Compass. Great fenders and at 58 mm just about perfect in size. I assume they will fit under the silver brakes, but I guess I'm not certain. (This is one reason I'm a canti fan.) The down side is the price - $149 Or I could just buy a slightly smaller tire. The RBW (Soma) offerings are listed as 34/35 mm actual. Compass offers two at 38 mm, which may be enough to clear these fenders. What to do? I'd like to learn from people who ride Betty's and may have already worked through this. Thanks, Michael -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
