I hate starting a thread about bottle cages. But i can't decide whether to get white cages or Chinese CF cages. The white is nicer but the price of Chinese CF is hard to pass up.

Which cages would you put on this frame? Please provide a link.

Something like this?
Amazon.com : Avenir Alloy Water Bicycle Bottle Cage (White) : Bike Water Bottle Cages : Sports & Outdoors

No. I was looking for something like this

Amazon.com : Elite Custom Race Gloss White/Acid, Green Logo : Bike Water Bottle Cages : Sports & Outdoors

But all white and not so expensive....

Try this in white: Arundel Sport Water Bottle Cage | Competitive Cyclist

Nah, skip the white; it'll look too frou-frou. Give it some gravitas with carbon weave...and complement that Athena carbon.

Whatever you like. No one else but you will notice or care what cages you have.

I learned a new saying today. "frou-frou" lol

True about the CF complimenting the Athena. My initial thought was CF would be too harsh.

You bought a Bianchi... don't cheap out now.

The celeste/black would look okay, but really, like Italian pop music, celeste is attractive only in small amounts.

+1

Whichever you can get for under $2 each. Spending more than that on a bottle cage is silly.

Many people will say, spending more than $200 on a bicycle is silly.

I stopped for a some food during a ride and the guy at the next table saw my bike and said it looked expensive. I told him it was, so he said how much? $2000? $3000? I told him more.. he was surprised, but if I told him what it really cost he wouldn't believe me.

These are not the lightest, but good solid cages that hold the bottles well. They have them in top load or you could get side load cages. Two cages for $20 shipped.

Lezyne Flow Cage White Bike Water Bottle Cage 44g Road MTB | eBay

Lezyne Flow Cage Side Load Right White Water Bottle Cage | eBay

Any of these celeste Elite Custom Race cages:




I would probably go for the white with celeste highlight as first preference. Nice bike by the way!

But a $2000 bike will outperform a $200 bike, by a noticeable amount. I don't believe that a $20 bottle cage will do any better at holding a water bottle than a $2 cage will.

In any case, I should come clean, I recently bought several bottle cages for $3 each, at a bike swap faire in San Diego a couple of weeks ago. But I needed a couple of them in a hurry. If I could have waited 2-4 weeks, I'd have gotten them from China on ebay, for less than $2 each. In any case, I generally buy either plastic or painted Aluminum tubular cages. I usually pay no more than $2 each for the plastic ones, and no more than $3 each for the aluminum ones.

I can't understand the purpose of spending $20+ (heck, I've seen them for over $50 a piece) on Carbon Fiber bottle cages.

Perform is a relative term. If your goal is to reduce weight as much as possible, then a 19g bottle cage assist in the bike performing better than if it had a 80g cage.

Next time, save the $2 and use one of the 3 jersey pockets.

The Bianchi cages are sexy, get one of those.

My plastic cages weigh under 40 grams. Maybe 55 grams for the aluminum ones. Other than steel cages, no bottle cages weigh 80 grams. Sorry, but paying Andrew Jackson amounts to save less than an ounce of frame weight is silly.

And sticking a bottle of water, weighing over a pound, in a jersey pocket, will degrade your riding performance FAR more than carrying an extra ounce of cage on your frame will.

And you're entitled to your opinion.

The last sentence is not opinion, it's fact: "And sticking a bottle of water, weighing over a pound, in a jersey pocket, will degrade your riding performance FAR more than carrying an extra ounce of cage on your frame will."

How can you call something that's subjective a fact?

Now you've lost all credibility when you say that.

Nope. The loss of credibility attributes to anyone making the absurd claim that carrying your water on your body does NOT degrade one's physical performance while pedaling. If you carry an extra pound to pound and a half of weight on your body in the form of a water bottle, where it can shift as you move, as you engage in the activity of bicycling, it will at least slightly degrade your physical performance. That is not subjective. It's objective fact. Much more so than if you anchor that same amount of weight, plus an extra 2 ounces of cage to do so, to the seat tube or down tube of your bicycle.

There is a reason that, universally, professional bike racers do not carry their water bottles in their jersey pockets when they are sprinting or climbing. It's because their performance would drop, at least slightly.

My prior comment, that spending $20 or more on a Carbon Fiber bottle cage, rather than a couple of bucks on a plastic or aluminum bottle cage - THAT was a subjective opinion. The statement that carrying extra weight on the order of a 1 to 1.5 pound water bottle on your body rather than in a cage on your frame while bicycling will degrade your performance somewhat, that remains objective fact. But feel free to try to disprove it.

So why do professional bike racers use expensive, and light, carbon bottle cages and not $2 ones? After all they both hold the bottle in place.

Maybe there's a performance gain by doing so....