Bottle cages for Sigg bottles

I use Sigg aluminium bottles on the bike – the 750 ml “Sports” model –, mainly because I have a bad habit of not washing my bottles when I get home and then at some point every plastic bottle has this ominous black spot of some kind of mould living in the bottom corner. The Sigg ones I can just fill up with boiling water every so often, and they have wide mouths, and their caps come apart, and everything can go in the dishwasher.

However, for the bottle cage, holding a rigid aluminium bottle is a different task than holding a squeezy plastic one. The first time I became aware of this was in Ireland in 2016. There was a persistent rattle on the bike that I was sure was the mudguard vibrating against the tyre . You know the kind of rattle. The kind that gets on your absolute tits so you can’t not try to fix it, no matter how flailingly useless your efforts are. It was on one session of getting the tools out to arse around with the mudguard that I must have left my rain jacket outside the saddlebag, so that I lost it. But the problem was actually the bottle rattling in the downtube cage. The cage was a Specialized aluminium one. I could get it to stop rattling for a while by bending the cage to hold it tighter, but this didn’t last long.

I then got a plastic Topeak Ninja, which held the bottle well. I used it for a few years, but I noticed that its tab at the top was touching the bottle at a rather sharp angle, and tending to eat into the paint on the bottle. The old cage got cable-tied onto the seat tube, where it didn’t cause any problems.

On New Old Bike, the first cages I got were cheap aluminium ones, but with plastic bits at the top. But these aren’t enough. The bottle hits the cage on the way in and out and there was an argument starting to happen about whose paint was hardest.

I googled cages for aluminium bottles and came up with the Mounty Power Cage. This certainly holds the bottles very firmly, but I found it very hard to get them in. In fact, I found it next to impossible to get the bottle back in while riding.

In a local shop, I picked up an SKS Slidecage. This had a nicer in/out action, but it was still pretty tricky to get the bottle in while riding. It’s also set up to be used from one side, and I discovered I often want to put the bottle back in with my left hand.

What makes it easy to get the bottle in? I looked into this, and believe it or not, the decisive factor is whether the opening of the cage is big enough that you can get bottom end of the bottle in without having to push the cage apart. Then it’s in, even if your aim isn’t very good – riding along while not looking down – and the rest is just giving it a shove down. No shit, Sherlock. Things I’d never thought about before.

So, given that the SKS Slidecage was almost good, I looked at the other SKS models. I noticed that the SKS Topcage has an adjustable top tab – so it should be possible to set it so that the effective opening is a bit bigger. Also, the top tab is gently rounded. I got a pair. They seem to hold the bottle nicely and the in/out action also seems very promising.

For the seat tube, I got the “Anywhere” version due to the lack of bottle bosses. This is well meant, but the Anywhere parts raise the cage off the tube by about an extra 15 mm. And this is very tight vis-a-vis the downtube cage and the top tube with the 750 ml bottle. I might yet try to fabricate something with a lower profile.

Aha. I see there are a variety of adapters that can shift a bottle cage along whatever tube its on by up to about 4–5 cm. This would already make room to move the seat tube bottle down. Potentially, there’s even space to move the downtube bottle up by 7–8 cm. I can see some more bodging on the horizon …