Friday, May 8, 2015

Fender Prelim

I ordered a 6.5" wide round fender blank off eBay. I found a vendor that had a 14 Gauge steel (heavy) fender that won't need rear brackets to hold it if I keep cut back to covering around half of the rear tire. The tire arrived quickly from vendor in California (4 days) and was well packed.

I positioned the fender on the tire and it's not quite fully radiused to this tire size, but it's close enough. I'm not going to pie cut it and bend it around the tire.

I then strapped it to the tire and took several pictures of the fender as I adjusted the rear tire coverage.

The picture just below shows the fender fully applied to the rear presenting a conventional appearance. This position would require some kind of mid-fender brackets.


Next picture below is slightly up from previous.


And again, a little more. This is about 3/4 fender over the tire.


In the next picture, the position was recommended to me by a fabricator. This is slightly past center. He told me that this provides significant protection over half coverage and still presents classic bobber look.


This is half coverage and is typical of what you see in a bobber fender.


This is less than half just to show some contrasts.


I will likely go with the just past center coverage. I will prune the excess fender off the bottom (left hand side) to make the "front" of the fender line up appropriately.

I already have a mounting method in mind. Fender will be mounted at the top and bottom of the softtail swing arm. More later.

Also, I contacted Michelin and asked them about how much growth this tire gets at 70MPH and it works out to less than 1/2", so I will make sure I have at least that when I measure the brackets that I will have to fashion.

What do you think?

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