If you have ridden longer travel bikes in the mud at some point, chances are you have already made something similar to the Mud Crutch out of an old tube and zip ties. Usually, gravity riders couldn’t care less about mud flinging from their tires – except when it goes straight to your eyes and affects your vision. At some point, a rider figured out that the mud that flies up between the fork arch and crown is destined for your face, which is why such style fenders are surprisingly effective. RaceFace isn’t the first company to create such a mud guard, but they did manage to make quite a good one that is easily attached with the built in Velcro strips. The whole thing is elastic so that when the fork compresses the Mud Crutch shrinks and won’t buzz the tire. Thanks to the light weight, and ease of installation and removal you won’t even know it’s there.
RaceFace was also on hand to make it known that they have been building Fat Bike compatible cranksets for some time, yet somewhat under the radar. At this point, every one of their alloy cranksets is available in 100mm options with adjustable chainlines from 63 to 67mm.
Interestingly, in the specs for the 100mm RaceFace cranks listed on a distributor’s website we noticed that it was specified that these will not be compatible with 186mm rear spacing. So apparently that wider fatbike spacing is coming. RaceFace mentioned that they were working on a new spindle to allow use of their cranks on the wider frames which will be available Fall 2013.
If you’re counting, the Atlas, Turbine, Evolve, Chester, Respond, and Ride are all offered in 100mm versions that are compatible with the big tire monsters. Both the Atlas and the Turbine include a lifetime warranty against defects and are competitive with most other fatbike cranks on the market as far as weight and strength is concerned. Not to mention they’re offered in an array of rad colors: Atlas – Black/Stealth/Raw/Blue/Red/
