Jan Heine at Bicycle Quarterly writes excellent bicycle reviews. A lot of his tests are randonneur-style bicycles. These are lightweight steel bikes with fenders, and often, integrated lighting systems. They’re designed to be ridden from anyway between 200km and 1600km in a single ride, so reliability is critical. I have lost track of how many reviews he’s written where one of the failures was fender hardware falling apart. This can be anything from annoying (buzzing and vibration) to dangerous (fender entangling around a wheel spinning at 40km/h).
This week I’m busy installing cantilever brake pivots and fender bridges on a 650b Randonneur bike I built in July. I was wondering how I could avoid the same mistake apparently everyone else, no matter how experienced, seems to make. People make noise about leather washers, but I thought, “why not something specific to the problem, like a star washer or a lock-ring washer?”
This evening I was sitting at my desk staring into space when I noticed a stack of books in the corner. Then I saw “Carroll Smith’s ‘Nuts, Bolts, Fasteners, and Plumbing Handbook.” Flip to the section on star washers and the like and find that he dismisses them as almost entirely useless. Oh, so I guess that’s not really going to help.
So I looked online, “Carroll Smith Star Washers” and I found a discussion thread where someone posted a link to Nord-Lock, a new washer system that is designed to keep the nut set. It’s worth watching because it has a really neat demo about how all sorts of other nut-locking systems fail.
I’m going to try these as a modern solution to the vibrating fender hardware problem. I’ll get stainless, oversized washers. Stainless so that it doesn’t rust (as much!) and oversized so that I don’t destroy the aluminum Honjo fenders.
