Whenever you ride more than a few miles, you’ll need to carry water. Which is why most modern bicycles make some sort of provision for fitting a bottle cage. This usually takes the form of a pair of rivnets on the downtube, spaced at just the right distance for mounting a standard bottle cage. In fact, many bikes will have a second pair of rivnuts on the seat tube, as well, and some—touring frames, mainly—will sport a third pair on the underside of the down tube. But not all bikes come so equipped. Rivnuts or “cage bosses” are rarely seen on older bikes, and a few inexpensive modern bikes also lack an easy way to fit a bottle cage. Is this a crippling defect? Certainly not. A simple bolt-on accessory will allow you to mount one or more cages to any bike. And it’s comparatively cheap, to boot.

A case in point: My vintage Schwinn Traveler. There’s not a rivnut to be seen. But Minoura’s Bottle Cage Holder stepped into the gap. Here’s the mount on my Schwinn’s down tube:

Not wanting to add more scratches to the Traveler’s frame, I placed a length of old inner tube under the clamp before screwing it down. And that was that. I used the mount for a year or so, and it did the job, but it has one annoying shortcoming: The base of the mount stands proud of the frame, and if your frame is small, as mine is, you won’t be able to fit a second cage on the seat tube. I could have mounted another Minoura cage on my bars, I suppose. The angle of the clamp can be adjusted to permit this. But I found what I think is a better alternative at VeloOrange: their somewhat awkwardly named Handlebar to Bottle Cage Mount. It’s simple and elegant and cheap, about half the price of the Minoura. (I see that VO also has old-fashioned bottle cage clamps for frame mounting. At three bucks the pair, they’re definitely worth considering.)

The Minoura might be said to be overengineered, and it’s a bit fussy to fit in consequence, but I don’t anticipate any problems with VO’s handlebar mount. Just clamp the mount on the bike’s handlebars somewhere near the stem, then bolt a cage to the mount with the supplied stainless steel screws. That’s all there is to it.

Need a drink? But you say there’s no place to put a bottle cage on your bike? No problem. An inexpensive bolt-on mount will help you slake that raging thirst in no time. It’s one of the many little things than mean so much to cyclists.

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