My deep sympathy goes out to anyone who has had their metal front fender crumple up, lock up their front wheel and cause harm to body and bike. I had a front hub lock up on me when I was young, throwing me over the bars with zero warning, and it was a huge bummer. Thank goodness I was going slow and only scraped up my face a little bit. I was gunshy on descents for years after that incident.
The two engineering solutions I've thought up for metal fenders are: 1. pre-notch the front stays to make them breakaway stays. I think it would work, but I'd want to do a bunch of testing, which would be expensive and time consuming 2. elevate the fender eyelet from the drop out up to the middle of the fork leg. The way it is now, if an object jams between tire and fender and starts the fender crumpling, the stay itself tightens onto the tire, locking it tighter and tighter as it rotates up. If the stay was attached higher up the fork leg, that initial crumple would cause the gap between fender and tire to open up rather than clamp shut. It would look un-traditional, but if you make it look smart and deliberate, I think you could pull it off. Add to that the technique of having the fender clearance at the trailing edge smaller and have it get progressively wider as the wheel rotates. Neither of these solve the heavy stick through the spokes, but breakaway fenders and even a fenderless bike are still vulnerable to that. On Wednesday, February 12, 2014 9:29:05 AM UTC-8, Will wrote: > > Yes. But the day they don't do fine... Is a bad one. Is a very expensive > one too. > > Been there. > > Will > > >>> -- 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 rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
