DIY Mud Flaps

This picture shows my Surly Crosscheck fixed-gear with a DIY mud flap mounted on the rear fender.
Click to enlarge.

When commuting home from work I often ride with a friend and occasionally we get caught in the rain. This same type of event has occurred while touring with friends. Rain isn't really a big deal in most cases but if you are the poor guy riding behind someone else you can often get more of a shower from the water off the back wheel of the bike in front of you then you do from the rain storm itself.

A solution that I've heard mentioned before is to add a mud flap to the bottom of your bike's rear fender. This will extend the fenders to the depth needed to prevent water from splashing up into the face of the rider who follows you.

Alex Wetmore's web site has an excellent article called Making Mud flaps for your Fenders. After reading his article and printing out the template I picked up the necessary DIY materials and made my own mud flap.

The needed materials consisted of a piece of stair tread rubber from a local hardware store for around $2.50 CDN and a small plastic zip tie. I used a drill with a small drill bit to cut two holes near the bottom of my rear fender but in a pinch simply using a sharp pointed screw and screwing it into the fender and then removing it would have worked fine. I also needed scissors to cut the rubber.

I found that Alex's template resulted in flaps that were shorter then I wanted for this particular bike so using the template as a rough guide I extended the flap significantly while making sure that it wouldn't drag on the ground.

I will be making a few additional modifications to the flap with the most important being some reflective material to improve visibility.

Mounting the mud flap was a snap using the zip tie and today when testing it for the first time by riding through some deep puddles at high speed with a friend following closely it was determined to be a great success! Especially if you ride with others while touring then you should consider making your own set.

Tell A Friend about this page!