After my old frame broke, I thought about what I wanted in a new bike.
I was willing to lose the disc brakes for the fender and rack mounts.
I searched high and low and found a few bikes that almost had what I wanted... Unfortunately the bike I want doesn't exist for under $1200 which is a wee bit much for my liking. Months of searching in vain on Craigslist for anything less expensive failed, and I gave up on the dream of my ideal bike.
Instead, I got a 2012 Trek 7.3 FX Disc for the low low price of $720 + a painful bit of sales tax. A few hundred more than I had wanted to spend, but it did meet all of my wishlist except for the frame.
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| Everyone loves new toys |
I promptly ordered a replacement battery for my Dual Cross 300 (at this point, I can wholeheartedly recommend Cygolite's stuff — the head light outlasted the battery pack and the bike I got it for!), SKS fenders, and thought about new rack (but ended up reusing my old rack for now). As of January 1, 2012 I am ridiculously out of shape and barely able to go anywhere, but I'm hoping in a few weeks my entire body will stop hurting after a few hill climbs.
It is a well known fact that SKS packages their fenders with instructions designed to deceive and punish half-men who read them. Of course, I tried reading them despite not really needing to (and, indeed, ended up led astray). After spending ages getting the new stay ends on (which I ended up having to remove from the front later) the real fun started.
The rear fender, I am happy to report, went on without a hitch. The caliper-side braze-on was positioned such that I didn't even have to cut or re-route the stay like on my old mountain-biked-turned-commuting-rig.
The front fender, on the other hand, was a bit of a pain. The SKS fenders do not come with the M6 bolt needed for mounting the fender to the crown (riddle me this: why the hell is that an M6 bolt when every other bolt on the bike is M5?). I'm guessing because most bikes have a brake bolt you can piggy back on (then again, the kit comes with about five extra bolts that have seemingly no use on any bike...).
A trek to Home Despot proved fruitless; a trek to the other super chain also yielded disappointing results. Both only carried plain steel metric bolts... I hacked it for a while until I could hop down to the bike shop to get a proper stainless steel bolt.
That challenge overcome, even more fun was to be had with the caliper-side stay. 1 The lower stay had to go directly through the caliper. I found a few different solutions, neither of which I ended up using.
I accidentally found the front fender I was never able to mount on my MTB and ... phew breathing room! Having two spare stays made it easier to experiment and eventually I found that cutting the the lower stay arm and mounting the stay to the upper rack eyelet was the easiest solution. This does require not using the newfangled integrated end caps (luckily I had the caps from the old set) because the insertion angle of the caliper-side stay isn't quite straight.
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| Caliper-side fender stay |
After two days of cursing at my bike success was mine.
1. Actually, I hacked the crown bolt mount using a smaller bolt and a nut first, and then solved the stay issue... followed by despair and pain as I discovered the front of the fender hit the tire. It seemed like this was because of the weird stay mount hack (the fender was under a bit of tension) and I wasted quite a bit of time adjusting the stays only to realize ... the fender wasn't flush against the crown. D'oh.
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