Project Fat Fender, Part II

Patty was out of town this weekend, which apparently gave me license to wreak havoc in the shop.  This post is the follow-up and conclusion to Part I.  I'll pretty much let the pictures tell the story.

When I split the fenders back in Part I, the rear went fine, but the blade walked a little toward the end of  the cut
cut on the front.  So first thing I needed to do was deal with that.

Not all better, but way more better.

This is what I'll use to fill in the newly open space between the fender halves.  It's .032" 5052 aluminum sheet.
This is a 48" x 42" remnant that cost me around $22.

Makeshift fence on the new bandsaw.  There are surely lots of different ways to cut strips out of sheet,
but I'm still needing to justify the purchase of this saw, so I'm going this route come hell or high water.

It took more than a little body english to feed the big floppy sheet across
the puny little saw table, but it worked, and the strips came out great.

I worked the strips back and forth across a piece of pipe, to give them some radius.

These are the fasteners I chose for securing the alum strips to the fenders halves.
They're 8-32 x 1/4" stainless steel screws with a black oxide finish. From McMaster-Carr.
About 14 bucks worth, with quite a few screws and a boatload of nuts left over.

The main thing to note about this picture was how dangerously low I was getting on project lube.
I rectified the situation with a refrigerator run shortly thereafter.

Bracketry

First mock-up of the front.  The fender is held off the tire with wooden blocks and that's some shock cord (bungee cord) holding everything together.

Larry accurately predicted in his comment on the Part I post that the added mass of these fenders was going to
overwhelm the already shaky stay system on the Cascadias.  Unfortunately, a new stay system is a whole 'nother
project, for another time, so the stock one will have to do.  But in order to make it work, the brackets also had to be split.

I needed some material for the mondo mudflaps that belong with these fenders, and I wanted to keep the weight
down as much as possible.  I ordered a couple of different materials, also from McMaster-Carr.  For this first
iteration, I chose the one on the left, which is 1/16" high-strength neoprene.  It's super floppy, so I'm
not sure how it'll work out.  I'll have to get back to you.  15-ish bucks for enough to do 4 mondo flaps.

This is the making of the bracket that will hold the flap to the fender.  It's a chunk of the .032" alum.  Here, I've
clamped it to some shims so that I can take a piece of flat bar and a hammer and make that indentation in the middle.
This will make way more sense in the next photo.

Rear fender hardware.  I wouldn't necessarily have had to make these with the lathe, but it's another
piece of equipment that I need to justify.

These are basically big washers that will go on the underside of the rear fender, where it attaches to the frame.

Rear mock-up.

There's a gap in the sequence here - I guess I got too tired to give a krap about taking any more pictures, but after burning it to the ground late into Saturday night, this is my Sunday morning in the living room.  Final-assembling the finished and now-painted parts together.  All the screws got blue loctite.

Ready to mount.  Time to head back out to the shop.  Brrrrr.  I liked it better in the living room.

Ready for mud.

All up, the cost was probably the better part of a Benjamin and everything added up to 2-1/2 pounds worth of fenders. They're a little floppy, but not as bad as I thought they might be. They won't be on the bike all the time - 3 screws in the front and 4 in the back is all it takes to get them on and off - but it will sure be good to have them in some conditions. Fat tires can kick up a ton of gunk. The mismatch on the shades of orange kind of bugs me - the pictures don't do it justice, but the fenders kind of clash with the frame. I had assumed that any different oranges would pretty much work together, so I didn't sweat the shade, but I think it's gonna bug me to the point that I'll need to do something about it at some point. Later. For now, it's time to go get dirty. So where's all the mud and snow?