Bottoms Up! – Bike Snob NYC

In yesterday’s post, I mentioned I could not identify this water bottle:

Fortunately a sagacious reader came to the rescue:

Wow, he ain’t kidding!

I had no idea these cages were now apparently functioning as stores of value, like Chris King headsets. It’s all the more surprising since Chris King headsets are arguably way overbuilt, whereas this is just a piece of rolled sheet metal with some holes cut out of it and a shelf bracket to keep the water bottle from falling through it.

Because I am a man of integrity, I promise my first thought was not that I could sell the cage and surreptitiously replace it with a cheap replica:

I was also not disappointed to find that these replicas are out of stock, because it didn’t matter to me, because I’d never do that.

I’m also surprised there’s a market for water bottles at all, since everyone knows the future of on-the-bike hydration is app-based water microdosing:

This isn’t the only vintage bottle cage for which people are asking big money, either, and apparently if you’re sitting on any of these (not literally, I don’t recommend sitting on bottle cages, don’t ask me how I know) you could also be set for retirement:

You’ll forgive me for not furnishing the eBay links, but I trust nobody in their right mind is going to buy them anyway:

Meanwhile, there are also some equally expensive cages on the road side, though at least they also come with the bottle:

And it should go without saying that people want lots of money for these:

I had one on the Vengeance Bike, and it was the first thing I removed:

This was partially because of the shape, but mostly because it looked like something you’d use to give a urine specimen, and between that and its age I was deathly afraid of drinking anything from it.

But yes, everybody knows you can automatically charge a premium for something if it has the word “Campagnolo” on it:

Meanwhile, in more modern tech news, behold the shockless rear suspension gravel bike:

Which I find disconcertingly insectine:

Just imagine a gravel bike that can go further offroad than all the other gravel bikes:

You may remember that as a “mountain bike,” and it seems gravel bikes are finally catching up with the AMP Research bikes of three decades ago:

Want to compare the numbers? Here’s the gravel bike:

And here’s the AMP, according to the review Paul sent me:

Not wildly different, but the gravel bike seems like it’s slightly more of a mountain bike than the old mountain bike…apart from the drop bars, though mountain bikes used to have those too:

I would argue that one reason the mountain bike caught on in the first place is that casual riders found the idea of flat bars more inviting than drop bars. And while there were of course mountain bikes that came stock with drop bars, and cyclists who preferred drop bars to flat bars for offroad riding, flat bars were generally the default. Yet here we are in 2025, and now everyone wants gravel bikes, which are pretty much exactly the drop bar mountain bikes of yore that never quite found a mainstream ridership.

Go figure.