If you need a mudguard that's extremely secure and effective, then the POWA Products DFender is the one to go for — assuming it'll fit your fork and you can stomach the price tag.
Sitting close to the tyre and mounting via a clamp on your fork’s arch, the DFender offers great protection, almost eliminating spray from the front tyre.
Once assembled and tightened down it stays put perfectly
It’s also very secure with very little wobble, even when riding in heavy mud.
It clears well too, though at first the sound of the odd stone getting dragged through the guard can be off-putting and in really claggy mud it can start to fill up, but by that point most other designs would be struggling too.
The clamp has a rubber insert, which means it won’t scuff up your paint like other designs that are secured with zip ties and the fact it is secured with a thumbwheel also means you can whip it off in moments, especially if you need to put your bike in the car.
It’s a little fiddly to assemble at first and you need to make sure the small nut that the clamp threads into doesn’t fall out, but once assembled and tightened down it stays put perfectly.
The clamp design is both the strength and the weakness of the DFender because it requires a clamp specific to the fork you’ll be fitting it on.
Powa Products currently offers mounts to fit all of the Fox Shox fork range and there’s also one that will fit to a RockShox Boxxer, Sektor or Revelation fork as well as another that will work with a Pike, Yari or a Lyrik.
If you do need another mount, they’re sold separately for £20, but if your fork isn’t on that list then you’re out of luck unless you can bodge something together.
Even if you can fit it to your fork, the DFender isn’t cheap thanks to being made entirely in the UK, though it has proved extremely durable and at 130g it’s not overly heavy either.