Product Review: King Cage Top Cap Mount

If all has gone according to "plan," I am now in Buffalo, and hopefully I'm still sleeping as my robotic super-assassin helper monkey posts this for me. That would be nice, getting a good night's sleep before the Lumberjack 100, especially since I just woke up from five hours of shabby sleep, which would be fine on a normal day, but today is an abnormal day. I've got an eight hour drive ahead of me, my sleep to driving ratio is way off.

I can't believe how far I have fallen, I used to be able to drive like a trucker on meth. Like Kowalski (in a 4 cylinder 4 X 2 pick up).



Of course I was a teenager on two fists of Mountain Dew. I once drove from Boston to San Francisco in three days at an average of sixteen hours a day. I think that would actually be illegal for a trucker to do, he'd have to forge his log entries. Log entries...I'm sure that crap is all recorded digitally in some way these days.

I gotta hit the road, but I wanted to talk about the crazy bottle cage mounting system I'll be running at the Lumberjack this weekend first.



It's a King Cage Top Cap Mount. I tried this thing out during my ride with Jeff Whittinghammer up in Waitsfield, VT a couple weeks back. It worked great. We were out on a long ride with little possibility of refueling and I hate running the camel-bags. I thought that having my bottle sitting up there on the bars would freak me all out, but it didn't, it was fine. I probably wouldn't run it if I were doing crazy-techy-chest on my saddle drop type rides, but for endurance stuff, for 100 milers like the Lumberjack...I think it's just the thing.



I didn't know which way to run it, so I went with the lower profile, long end facing back style pictured above. This style does give you less knee-clearance. Technically you are supposed to run it with the long end facing forward, which is how I'll be running it this weekend. Looking at the thing, you might think that it is basically a bottle-launcher, and it might be...if you don't run King Cages. I'm pretty sure you could mount a King Cage upside down on your downtube and your bottle wouldn't eject, even on the Mount Snow downhill.

When I met Ron "King Cage" Andrews in Durango last August, I was coming off a rash of bottle ejections (it was my near-deadly bottle ejection at the Darkhorse 40 on that 100 degree day last season that tore it for me). After talking to Ron's buddy George about his ten year run of zero bottle ejections, I jumped at the chance to buy a couple King Cages. Since then — no bottle ejections, not even on Milagrosa during SSUSA (OK, we're not counting the Chelada ejection).


When I visited Ron's shop, I got to stamp a top cap mount with my wife's name, then, realizing that she's not eight-years-old, and that she doesn't have a license plate on her bike with her name on it, I decided to put it on my bike instead. An $8 custom stamped top cap mount is way cheaper than a tattoo.

I'm stoked on the top cap mount thing, I'm hoping I'll be able to complete the 33 mile lap at the Lumberjack with no stops for water, and not having to run a camelly-bag or throw a bottle in my jersey pocket is pretty awesome. I think it's a killer idea for endurance stuff, but it would also work well for small frames that only have one bottle cage mount (like M's Hi-Fi), kids bikes (that actually use a threadless steerer system like the Fisher Precaliber), or for bike-pathers on their hybrids. The bottle is just way easier to get to up there on the bars than it is on the down tube.

Diagnosis:

King Cage Top Cap Mount, wicked good idea.

Butanyway, not sure if I'll be able to get any of the Lumberjack stuff up on the cyclingdirts before Monday, but I will try. I am going fully strapped with cameras and lap tops and all that crap, so the potential is there. We'll see what happens.

Have a nice weekend and try not suffer as much as I'll be suffering out in Michigan.