I have one bottle cage and one Fabric cageless bottle option on my road bike.


The down tube has the bottle cage and the seat tube has the cageless. Seems to work out pretty well for me. On short rides, the cageless bottle stays home and there are only some small attachment pieces that don't mess with the bike's clean lines or aesthetics. On longer rides, primary hydration is from the caged bottle. Then drink from the cageless bottle at stop signs/traffic or other stops.


I have never had the Fabric cageless bottle come loose - same can't be said about some of the poorer excessively light bottle cages.


The Fabric cageless bottle can be difficult to put back while riding, on the down tube it isn't too bad but on the seat tube it can be nearly impossible at speed.

No complaints.

I have had these for one season and grew to hate them. Main issue is that they fall on rough terrain, like over rail road tracks. But also I had to look down to reattach the bottle every time I took a sip. Eventually one of them broke after the fall and I was happy to throw them both out and replace with light carbon cages.
Also, they dont have an insulated version.

they have an insulated version now. Interesting you are having problems since they seem well received over on MTBR

Yes, with cageless bottles you now also have to rotate the bottle into the correct position. Its like hinging a door.

This. The inventors trying to solve a non-problem created an even bigger one.

I hope people don't judge Fabric by their bottles but judge them by their saddles.

Their saddles are great and the engineers who designed them clearly understand cycling. Their marketing people who named the various models, not so much.

Naming schemes and bottles aside, Fabric is the new Fizik.


-Tim-

I have a couple of travel bikes (S&S and Ritchey Breakaway) so I've long been thinking that a cageless bottle setup would be nice for packing up and assembling my bike. After a 7 hour flight through 6 time zones, it's surprising how the simplest things become more complicated. So when I found the Fabric bottles at half price at an LBS, I bought one to try out. The bottle stayed in despite very rough road conditions but the ease of getting it back into the studs was lacking. I just didn't feel comfortable particularly at speed on rough surfaces getting the bottle back onto the studs. I expect that I would get better at this but I just wasn't into another learning curve to get to that point. In addition, the valve of the bottle wasn't very efficient and didn't deliver the water with the ease of my conventional bottles and I didn't see that this would change no matter how good I got at replacing the bottle back on the frame. So, cages back on for now at least. With a trip to the Pyrenees in 4 weeks, I don't need another thing to try to make work.

These quick connects may be what you want to try next https://www.trekbikes.com/us/en_US/e...mount/p/22119/

Yes, those do look good but expensive particularly for 2 sets! Think I'll be just using cages for a while longer at least.