rear fender rubber buffer

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Re: rear fender rubber buffer

Postby Jim Garrett » Sun Jul 01, 2018 12:19 pm

How thick is the fender buffer supposed to be? I can get closed cell foam, black, in sheets of varying thickness in town from a place that sells rubber products. I often use 1/4" for miscellaneous projects. Last time I was there, they had 1/8", 1/4" 1/2" and maybe others. Let me know if I can help. jim
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Re: rear fender rubber buffer

Postby wz507 » Sun Jul 01, 2018 2:21 pm

Jim Garrett wrote:How thick is the fender buffer supposed to be? I can get closed cell foam, black, in sheets of varying thickness in town from a place that sells rubber products. I often use 1/4" for miscellaneous projects. Last time I was there, they had 1/8", 1/4" 1/2" and maybe others. Let me know if I can help. jim


0.5" thick
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Re: rear fender rubber buffer

Postby wz507 » Sun Jul 08, 2018 7:57 pm

Earlier in this topic a dimensioned image of fiftysevenXLs NOS foam buffer was offered. I have been diddling around with some EVA foam and made a piece sized to the dimensions provided. When I pressed the piece into my bracket and onto the fender I noted that the foam was a bit shorter (~ 0.5”) than the overall bracket length, as the bracket straps 7-1/4" along the inside edge and the length given for the NOS foam piece was 6-1/8". And of course due to the foam thickness there is a significant difference when the foam is in place between the inside and outside lengths of the arc. In the parts book illustration the foam is drawn to be the same length as the bracket.

As noted elsewhere on the forum – viewtopic.php?f=3&t=835 - the bracket has a short and long side laterally, but also has a short and long side fore/aft as shown in the image below.
fore-aft bracket length.jpg
fore-aft bracket length.jpg (77.96 KiB) Viewed 5336 times

Thus the foam could be installed to start at the edge of the bracket on the chain side, or the edge of the bracket on the primary side, or could be centered between the bracket ends. So my question for those of you that may have 1) seen the real deal back in the day, or 2) still have the real deal, was the foam significantly shorter than the arced bracket, was it shifted to one side or the other, or was it full length along the entire bracket length?

My intuition from playing with this today is that the foam would be installed tight to the chain end of bracket and would come up slightly short on the opposite end of the bracket that wraps the fender further.

Thanks for any insight you might be able to offer.
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