Mucky Nutz Bender Fender £8.99
A couple of weeks ago the Mucky Nutz Bender Fender arrived on the Bikemagic editorial desk. A small shaped sliver of plastic with a roll of Velcro and instructions for fitting on the back, we were intrigued that something so light and simple would be any good. Well the simple truth is we’ve been blown away with how damn good it has been.
Bender Fender’s are made by a small Sheffield-based company, who we’ll presume were fed up with getting mud and horse shit flung in their eyes and faces by the front wheel of the bike, and set about trying to solve the problem. The solution they’ve come up with is so simple yet effective that we wish we’d thought of it.
It’s about as simple to fit as it gets. A little time with a pair of scissors is required to trim the supplied Velcro roll into five equal lengths, which then feed through slots at the front of the fender and attach to the fork legs and crown. It’s a little fiddly at first to get the fender to stay put while you secure it with the Velcro, but once it place it holds firm.
Its performance is highly impressive. It sits very close to the tyre and is just the right size and shape to stop mud/water/crud/poo being flung up by the tyre into the eyes when you’re blasting down a squelchy trail. As a contact lens wearer this is good news indeed. We’ve found it far more effective than a downtube mounted mudguard, making the Crud Catcher redundant. We’ve since removed it altogether.
The plastic used is very thin and highly flexible, meaning that it’s both light, just 16g, (easily the lightest mudguard for weight weenies reading this) and in the event of a crash it doesn’t snap or break (and we can verify this following a stack recently).
Verdict
In use it’s the best solution we’ve come across for stopping all that mud being flung into the eyes. It’s also really good looking, in a sleek minimalist style, and in our books is preferable to stretching a bit of inner tube between the forks. Oh, it’s pretty cheap too.
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