I got one of these as a gift many, many years ago. I remember “back in the day”, the King ti cage commanded serious mojo, as it still does today. It cost all the money and was amazingly light at an advertised 28 grams. Supposedly, it didn’t mark up polyethylene bottles and make them all black, since ti was inert and oxide free. This cage had no place on the Freeride rig, and the XC bike had a wonderful (but now discontinued) metal-matrix Blackburn Chicane MTN cage, so appropriately, the retro King cage found its way onto the Bridgestone MB-1.
It’s a cage. It holds a bottle. The grip is tight, but the curvature of the bail doesn’t quite match the shape of a standard bike bottle, so bottles will stick out at a slight angle to the left or right. That sort of bugs me. It’s nice when you slide a bottle into a cage and it goes “click” and falls precisely into place. Bottles are definitely held firmly in this cage, but this is seemingly more by sheer force and less by proper design or manufacturing execution.
In general quality, the welds are all affected adequately. The joint in the loop of titanium tubing that forms the hoop is smooth, but the welds that hold the two thin sheet titanium mounting plates are undercut at the ends. Granted these are handmade in the USA on a low volume, limited basis, so one could call the apparent “flaws” signs of “character”. Po-tay-to, po-tah-to… There’s also a solid stainless steel version that’s still expensive, but a lot less coin than the tubular titanium one.
Acceptable
2 out or 4 skulls
MSRP around $60 USD
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