Rear fenders give excellent coverage

My experience: I’ve ridden with the SKS Race Blade Fenders in both wet and dry conditions on my Bianchi road bike for 2 weeks.

Usability: 3/5
Installation: 5/5
Style: 4/5
Build Quality: 5/5
Overall: 4/5

Summary:
SKS recently released its Race Blade fenders, a line of fenders geared toward use on road bikes where the frame and fork design prohibit the use of traditional fenders. Race Blade fenders allow the owners of road bike to still ride with the basic protection of fenders. If you want to go without fenders, these are built to be easily removed within seconds.

The Race Blade fenders while not covering as much of the wheel as full fenders offer fairly good coverage. As long as you don’t mind a little occasional road spray on turns these can work if your road bike is your only bike for everyday transportation.

These fenders are sold for about $50 as the Race Blade (for 19-23mm tires) and Race Blade XL (for 23-32 mm tires.) Styles include black, silver, and carbon. The fenders comes with all the parts you need to install and extra rubber bands.

Who needs these fenders
Most road bikes built these days have low tire clearance and lack of eyelets and fender bolt holes ruling out regular fenders. In the past, cyclists wanting fender coverage were stuck with mountain bike style fenders like the SKS Mud Max Downtube & Xtra Dry Rear Fenders I reviewed a few weeks ago.

The SKS Race Blade fenders offer road bike owners fuller fenders to fit most any traditional, double diamond, road frames with tires in the 19-32 mm range. Bike Planet also makes a similar design called the SpeedEZ which fits tires up to 28 mm.

While geared toward making your road bike more transportation friendly, I think even the recreational rider would find these fenders useful to cut down road spray when it gets wet. (In fact, the packaging for the my fenders had a picture of a Jan Ulrich look-alike in a full T-Mobile kit on his carbon road bike with these fenders.)

I run 23 mm tires on my road bike, but It was unclear from some descriptions online what the range of the slightly larger Race Blade XL was, so I went with the standard Race Blade instead.

Installation & Build Quality

Cutting the Rubber Bands to Fit

The Race Blades were easy to install with good documentation in the packaging. Rubber feet at the end of the fender mounts are placed on the fork and seat stays of the bike to hold the fenders up. You move these feet up and down the frame until you get to just the right place to give you clearance. Once you have them positioned, you hook their rubber bands with wholes punched at regular intervals on the fender feet and wrap the rubber band tightly around your fork and stays to keep the fenders in place. After you have gotten the right tightness, you cut any excess rubber band to keep it out of your wheels and give a clean look. Extra rubber bands are included in case you mess up or want to put them on other sized bikes.

While the installation was easy, I did find their recommended clearance to be a little tight. They recommend 1.5 cm about the tire. After riding a bit, I found the fenders rubbed my tire slightly when I put down the hammer on sprints and when I had my child trailer attached. These instances caused more than usual frame flex, so I just adjusted them up.

I do have to re-center the rear fenders about once a week. This probably has more to do with me using the wall as my kick stand than anything else.

The build quality is follows the high, Teuton build of other SKS products. The plastic fenders look metallic and feel sturdy, and the rubber bands that secure the fender mounds are of high quality.

Usability and Style

Front fenders give decent coverage on straights

After I installed these, I found myself praying for rain so I could try them out. Luckily, our dry spell was broken within a week with several rain days in a row. I found ability of the fenders to block spray to be quite good on the back wheel and when riding a straight line. The front fenders yielded a light spray on turns that while not too bad for me in shorts would have been a problem in pants I wanted to keep pristine. These cover a decent amount of the wheel but not as much as traditional fenders so this is not total unexpected.

I think the best part of these fenders when compared to the SKS Mud Max and Xtra Dry fenders is the style. I think the silver version I got looks very nice for plastic fenders. With classic styling, they do not look out of place on my Italian road bike. This means I will not be removing them when it turns dry like I did with the previous fenders thus saving me when it unexpectedly turns wet.

Final Thoughts
While not giving the full coverage of traditional fenders, the SKS Race Blades offer a legitimate option for cyclists using a road bike for commuting and general transportation. I’m definitely keeping these for the foreseeable future.