Fabric Cycling strike again

The bottle cage is a design that has existed since cycling’s early days, and though various incarnations have existed over the years the fundamental design has remained the same. Though you can spend £30 on a carbon fibre bottle cage that weighs 20odd grams and not notice it on your bike weight-wise, the issue that most people bring up is how they spoil the look of your bike.

Bottle cages are ugly. And for what they are, expensive.

Enter Fabric Cycling and this ingeniously simple cage-less design.

When we last visited the guys at Charge Bikes and Fabric Cycling to talk about saddles, they showed us a rapid prototype of a new water bottle system they were about to produce. A few weeks later and we had our hands on a pre-production sample which we’ve used non-stop ever since.

And this is what you need to know about the cageless water bottle:

• The first water bottle will be called 600ml Water Bottle.
• It comes with mounting studs and bolts.
• It will cost £9.99
• The cost is substantially less than a super light cage, and a similarly sized bottle
• Bottle and mounting studs weigh just 73grams
• When there is no bottle on the bike, the studs look clean and barely visable

Does it work?

The eagle eyed amongst you might have spotted the bottle or mounting studs in various images on Factory Jackson over the last couple of months – we’ve been using the system non-stop on a variety of different style rides, including a few uplifts at Bike Park Wales. Each time we used a full bottle, and left it on for the uplift to see if it could be shaken loose – but no such issues.

We’ve not lost the bottle yet – it work’s brilliantly.

A new multi-use mounting system

Our pre-production sample is a little different to production samples – we actually found ours quite stiff in use, as far as mounting the bottle and removing it goes. Once used to the position, we never found it an issue to locate the bottle on easy going terrain. It was a little stiff to remove, but certainly not hard once used to it – just a slight tug to release it from the mounting studs.

The production units we’ve just seen are much more refined. The channels in the base of the bottle are slightly better and the studs have a defined shape – ours were a little rounder, which made the bottle a touch trickier to use.

Though this mounting system is ideal for the water bottle, the Fabric team hinted there were other products in the pipeline that could benefit from this mounting system.

Watch this space.

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