Unpleasant bicycling discovery of the day
It was raining today, but I needed to ride downtown to do some consulting for a company I used to work for (3 hours of work isn’t much, but it’s better than nothing) despite the rain. And, once again, I discovered that bicycle-front fender ::= shoes so full of water that they became little fountains with every step I took when I got off the bike and walked into the office there.
It’s the curse of a small bicycle frame (a 55cm top tube and 4.5cm fork rake combined with platform pedals and toe clips leaves me with about 5cm of toe overlap. Toe overlap which has bitten me often enough so I didn’t even bother to try and put the front fender back on after the last time it wedged against the wheel, pretzeled, and flipped me off onto the pavement) – I either only ride during good weather, get my feet and lower legs sopping wet if there’s any sort of water on the line, or crash my bicycle on 1000 mile intervals.
I suppose that I could always cut the fender off above the toe overlap area, then fasten the cut off part onto my downtube so it would at least pretend to catch some of the water that shoots off the tire and is bounced off the tube and onto my lower appendages. It would certainly be cheaper than going up to one of the local bike co-ops, finding an old larger frame, then getting it nicely powdercoated and ready to go.
(Actually this wasn’t the only unpleasant bicycle discovery; I also discovered that the cheap rain jacket I bought to replace my Showers Pass jacket after it vanished somewhere between here and Boring was cheap because it didn’t actually keep the rain away from me. Drat, but that’s a unpleasant situation I’ll have to resolve on a different day.)