Wednesday, August 10, 2011

The Phoenix Project - Further Fender Follies

I finished up with the rear fender this evening.

My exquisite little hand-crafted fender mount worked like a champ.  I used a faucet washer between the bracket and the chainstay bridge for vibration dampening:


It doesn't even look too bad, although next time I'm in there I may polish up some of the file marks a little more.

I fit this mount first and satisfied myself with its location and adjustment.  The rear wheel was in the frame providing support for the fender.

I then held the fender up against the seat stay bridge and marked the back of the seatstay bridge on the fender.  This was used as a reference point to position the Honjo L bracket: 


To drill the holes for this L bracket, first I removed the fender from the bike. Then I taped the L bracket on the fender with quasi-sticky blue masking tape according to the reference mark taken from the seatstay bridge.  With a 1/8" drill bit, I used the taped on bracket as a template.  Following drilling, the resulting burrs are smoothed with a bid of sandpaper.

It is difficult to see, but again, there is a faucet washer between the bracket and the seatstay bridge for vibration dampening.

With these two brackets in place, mounting the fender stays is a snap:


Right now, I used the configuration of one eyelet per stay as provided by Civia.


As noted earlier, I'm a one eyelet per stay skeptic and my default inclination is to circle back later and convert to two eyelets per stay.  In the interim, I decided to try an experiment with a backing plate on the fender stay eyelet:


You can see where I filed some flats on the fender washer so it fits in the channel on the fender.  Just pushing the fender back and forth, it feels a lot stiffer than the floppy single eyelet fenders I got from Velo Orange before they went to two eyelets per stay, so I'm guardedly optimistic.

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