Mucky Nutz Fender
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Quality
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Value
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Fit
Summary
For a very low cost, everyone should be running one of these fenders on their bike, or have one in the car ready to run at a moments notice.
There are few upgrades that are less expensive that do as much as adding a mountain bike fender. Mucky Nutz mountain bike fenders are some of the most well known in the indusrty. Riding mountain bikes in early spring means lots of mud and puddles. For around the cost of a 12 pack, you can protect your bike, save some clean up time, and keep your grill dirt free.
We took the Mucky Nutz XL fender strapped to our Fox Float 36, and the standard Mucky Nutz fender strapped to the rear, more on this later. We opted for the velcro attachment knowing we would want to be able to easily remove them for bike washes. You can however go with zip ties, which make the installation a little easier, but you will need to cut and re-attach if you want to remove the fenders.
The fenders are super light weight, you wouldn’t know they were there if you weren’t admiring how cool your bike looks with them attached. The sound of the Mucky Nutz fender stopping sand and pebbles is also gratifying knowing it’s not sandblasting your down tube.
The bike fenders can be installed or removed in seconds with the velcro attachments.
One problem we ran into running the XL Mucky Nutz fender was when using a front tire clamp bike rack like on our Kuat NV, the tire clamp should sit right where the fender in. The nice thing about the fenders is that they are flexible, so we just clamp down over the top of them.
With complex suspension linkages, problems arise. For example we were riding the new Pivot Firebird (watch for upcoming reviews on this bike) and noticed that tiny rocks and bigger pieces of sand were getting stuck in the lower part of the DW link. The thought of that grinding away at a carbon frame isn’t a pretty site. We threw some 3M helicopter tape on the link and frame to protect it. Then we thought wouldn’t it be nice if we could keep the grit from getting in there in the first place? The Mucky Nutz standard fender fits almost perfectly to the Pivot Firebird rear triangle and does a pretty good job of keeping the debris out of the linkage.
Overall, we think mountain bike fenders are great, they look kinda cool, they are inexpensive, and they very simply do what they should do.
Update:
We just got the new Full Face Fender and gave it a run today in some variable wet conditions. As you can see by the photos, it’s perforated around the rear of the fender so it wraps around the tire more, buts still has a great look to it. You can see the muck on the downtube from running the MuckyNutz XL on the front. After our ride with the Full Face, there was almost no new mud on the down tube. It does a far better job of actually being a fender and less than some enduro status symbol.
