flip-flapping in the breeze

... actually, currently flip-flapping in the basement...
It's:
My latest finished project!

Good thing, since that's what this thing was pretty much intended for. The cultural criticism and nature writing is well and good, but I'm supposed to making stuff. I have been, and I'm gonna tell you about it.

Hobby Lobby. I don't know quite what it is about Hobby Lobby. I don't quite like going there. Some of it is that it's a chain store, but there just aren't many local craft stores of that sort around. There's a nice yarn shop a mile from my house, and local places to get paint and assorted art supplies... but I think all the fabric shops are chains of at least some size. Anyway, there are certain things for which Hobby Lobby is indispensible. One of these, for some reason, is yellow rip-stop nylon... about which more in another post or two. Two of these is scrap leather. They get these bags of cast off bits of a variety of shapes and sizes and colors from... I dunno, saddleries and cobblers and purseries and whatnot. They stick a bunch of bits in a bag and I go and pick up a bag or two and try to decide what to do with 'em all.

First thing I've done now is to make up a pair of leather mudflaps for one of my bicycles. The venerable Brooks of England makes leather mudflaps... they cost $30 a piece. One can also get some through Velo-Orange, for cheaper. Now you can get them from me! I decided, since I had the leather, some punches, knives and leather treatment stuff made out of bee secretions I should just make some myself.

First I figured out a good size based on measuring my fenders and checking the listed sizes for the Velo-Orange and Brooks styles, figuring it's best to copy what's out there first of all. I also was limited by the sizes of leather pieces I had in colors that roughly matched one another (for front and rear flaps). So I came up with a pattern, and made a template on some lovely green paper.

That's the negative shape of course, I traced the positive shape on the leather, but either would work, I think the positive shape was probably wandering around somewhere out of reach when I took this blurry photo though.

So then I cut out my trapezoids (not trapeziuses... that would hurt), and punched holes for mounting, like so:

I also needed some mounting bolts, so I went to the hardware store (the little local one) and got these slick and shiny fellas. They're SAE, not metric, but come close enough that I can use my metric bike tools to mount them without ruining everything.

Aren't those lovely? They did have that type in metric, but only in black, and I'm a sucker for shiny bits of metal.

Next order of business was cleaning and weather-treating the things since they're going to be catching lots of mud and dirt and water and gunk and stuff and ambiguous goo. Behold the stuff:

Yeah... that's all. And then the flaps looked like SO:

but rather less blurry...











And then I drilled holes in the fenders to match the holes in the flaps like SO:














And assembled with the bolts like SO:












(with and without flash)




And that was it really.

Now they are sitting in the basement because the bike they are intended for is in a hundred pieces in the basement as well. But they're pretty cool I think and I wanted to share.

Hope you've enjoyed it.