Front Fender Solution For A Tadpole Trike

My recent mudding experience reinforced the need for front fenders on my trike. Attaching front fenders to a trike can be tricky, especially with disc brakes. Different manufacturers have different solutions when they make an attempt at all. ICE and Greenspeed have notably interesting fender solutions, and what we've done has a little in common with how Greenspeed attaches front fenders.

The parts used are Planet Bike Freddy Fenders including hardware (for 20 inch wheels in my case), a pair of nifty aluminum curved bar ends, a couple rubber lined hose clamps from the hardware store (5/8)and some bolts and lock nuts.



The bar ends are attached to the handlebars and extend over the wheels. The curve of the bar ends is absolutely perfect on my RecumbentUSA trike and should work for Actionbent trikes too. If you look at how Greenspeed attaches front fenders you can see they use bar ends as well, just attached differently. The other end of the bar ends attach to the steel mount protruding from the top of the fenders using the rubber lined hose clamp from the hardware store, bolts and lock nuts. One caveat is that at the moment anyway I have very little clearance around the brake levers. The bar ends will only reach so far over the wheel so the fenders pretty much have to be mounted with the bar end that close. This will vary depending on how meaty your hands are and which brake levers.



This alone is loose and bouncey (as would be only using the hardware that came with the fender on one side of the wheel). So I've used the fender stays that came with the fender to attach to the disc brake and the same bolt that holds the bar end to the handlebar. The fender stay that attaches to a bolt on the disc brake needed to be shortened a bit. So I used a chop saw to cut off the appropriate amount. Measure to fit for your trike. The other fender stay I simply bent artfully to attach to the bar end. You could bend and cut it too instead of having the artsy "S" curve but I like it. Note the fender stays in the photo below.



The whole thing is as solid as a fender gets. I rode over the scattered branches left over from the chainsawing of the fallen tree pictured in my previous post and the fenders did not bounce or having any other problems.

Here is a final photo of the bar end over the fender attached with the hose clamp and bolt with lock nuts.