Mudflaps et cetera

It's been raining.  All of last night and today it's been raining very heavily in Sydney town.  So an appropriate time to sit at home, veg out and talk about mudflaps.  So my roadster has nice full length mudguards from velo-orange and I have a Carradice cape and spats which means riding in the rain isn't all that bad at all.   I wouldn't want my velo-orange mudguards any longer as they already catch on things. The beauty of mudflaps is that they don't catch on kerbs or other objects low to the ground but offer that extra protection from spray to your feet and your drivetrain.

I now had to make a mudflap.  Having never had a mudflap on a bicycle before didn't help, I did notice the need for one as the front mudguard, as long as it is, didn't really catch all of the water flicked up by the front wheel.  Off to clark rubber I went and I bought some 3mm fabric reinforced rubber sheet.  I cut out a trapezoidal shape, rounded the edges and bolted it through the front.  



Worked pretty well.  A lot of extra water that the mudguard would miss would be caught by the flap.  Although I found that water would be too easily deflected out the side and onto my feet.  I needed something taller and wider....  Introducing Mk II mudflap :)


This shows the old one with the new wider and taller one.

MkII fitted

You can see it's a fair bit larger, mostly wider.
After a few wet rides, I can say it works a fair bit better than the old one, mostly because of the increased width, it's slightly taller as well which helps.  More spray gets deflected, in a big puddle the water comes off the sides and some gets on my shoes, but most of it gets pushed off to the side so far that it misses.  It's a big improvement on MkI in that regard.  Here's a video of it in use.


Here's a slo-mo screencap of a pass through a big puddle, you can see most of the water being deflected sideways past my feet.


It's the most totally un-aerodynamic little device, but it works a treat going through big puddles.  I've seen even bigger mudflaps that are so tall they wrap around the stays at the top.  Maybe this could be MkIII?  That's all for now.

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