Our friends at SKS sent us a pretty cool mod of their SKS X-tra Dry fender to make it fat-bike friendly. The fat bike fender solution came to SKS from Gene Cappelletti from Oswego, NY. Crystal Trout, of SKS USA told us, “We’ve seen numerous fat fender creations, but this is one of the best that we have seen.” Huzzah to Gene for his ingenuity and for making a sweet looking fender solution! I wanted to know a bit more about the project, so I rang Gene up on the telly to find out what he used for the skirt. When he told me….we both laughed outloud. It turned out that he used a seven dollar trash can and some automotive pop fasteners, that he bought at a home improvement store, to make a fender that looks as good as, it is functional. Gene didn’t like the looks of what was on the market, so he decided to make something better!
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- Trim the skirt from the trash can
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- Clamp the skirt to the fender and drill holes
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- Pop the fasteners thru the holes
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- Slap it on your seatpost and ride!
If you’re like Gene and you’ve modified something to make it rock, send us some photos and we’ll try to share it here abouts! Send your stories to uncle gomez@fat-bike.com.
Rear fenders over the top of the tire like that do nothing in my opinion. All the spray goes out behind you. What you have to worry about if you are worried about spray is the BB area, and a fender like this won’t protect that.
We’re getting a fender in to test, that you’ll like.
I did the same thing with my sks fender. I bought a $8 section of plastic gutter drain thingy, cut it to fit, and pop riveted this to the fender. I blacked out the pop rivet heads with a sharpie pen and all is good. It’s cheap, looks good and works!
I’ll have to try that with my SKS. First I will call upon the Eye of Thunderra and say: HOOOOOOOO!!!!!
Then I will use my Gepetto-esque skills with a utility knife and cut plastic to accommodate plastic. Then, plastic rivets/fasteners – snap snap snap!
Pop goes the weasle and the weasle goes pop!
For the front though – I did swallow a good gloppiferous amount of salty road slush the other day – I thought I would puke, but I didn’t. Nasty! So I must widen a fender to put on the down tube since I have a rack up front at the moment.
$7? So highbrow. I bought a plastic $1.99 3-ring binder from an office supply store to make a down tube fender. Drill out the rivets on the ring mechanism and you’re left with a sheet of plastic similar to Dave’s Mud Shovels. Cut and sculpt as needed…
The local plastics shop usually has 1/16 plus or minus high density polyethylene in some colors as scrap that are super cheap too…