SKS

Bluemels Full Coverage Fender Set

Looks good but atrocious installation

Familiarity:

I've used it once or twice and have initial impressions

Good news - These fenders look good on my Surly Preamble and keep me dry on rainy days. Build quality seems fine. These fenders are made of decent quality plastic and aluminum, but the edges of the plastic fenders were irregular and rough. Overall, the build quality is probably a little low for the price you're paying. Bad news - These fenders took me multiple hours to install and required me to make up my own installation process. I already had a hint of what I was getting into when I bought these fenders as I had done some research on what was required. I knew that I would need to cut the struts to length, and I figured that would be a relatively straight-forward process. Unfortunately, that was not the case. The instructions provided by SKS are a bit bizarre, and instruct you to cut the struts while attached to your bike. I don't know about you, but cutting struts right next to my bike frame with a hacksaw seems like a really bad idea. When you do cut the struts, the black paint used on them starts to flake off, so you have to be really careful about getting a nice clean cut if you want to maintain the look of the struts. Why SKS didn't recommend a simpler method (such as using a strong wire cutter versus a hacksaw), I'm unsure. Next, the bolts provided by SKS to attach the fenders to your frame come in three sizes. Unfortunately, all three of the sizes were either way too big or way too small. That means that I had to cut multiple bolts by hand in order to get them to a size that didn't interfere with the brakes, wheels, etc. Finally, the method SKS uses to make these "disc brake compatible" (mentioned on the FAQs of their websites) is to just stack a bunch of spacers between the fork and the struts. Unfortunately, the spacers are not a great fit around the bolt and if you need to stack a few (I needed 7 on my front fork), they look horrendous as each one is offset from the other. I actually ended up 3D printing my own spacer to get around this. Overall, the installation process was atrocious, and I'm saying this as someone who had all the tools available and had a successful end result.