Originally Posted by
timvan_78
same climate here. Almost 2hrs/day commuting. Your symptoms sound like me last year. (rider and bike coated in grit)
This winter I (mostly) modified my route to minimize crushed gravel paths and bought full fenders that are very close to the tire (crud roadracer).
I wash 1x/week. The bike, that is. It sounds like your fender system needs tweaking. Longer mudflap? Lower profile (less clearance) on the fenders?
I'd recently gone to the SKS RaceBlade, which are excellent for attaching to a low-clearance frame like mine, but required some ingenuity to achieve full coverage - which is a jazzed-up way of saying I cut up a big plastic bottle to make a seat-tube-mounted fender extension to below the bottom bracket. However, I think you're right that a further tweak is required: there's a very distinct line between the clean and dirty vertical regions of the bike, and the crud appears mostly to be flung from the front wheel, so I suspect that the mudflap that came with the front RaceBlade is not descending low enough, and will require a generous application of trimmed plastic bottle.