Riding: My go to riding essentials.

There has been about a handful of items over the years that I have ended up returning to time and time again, or rather, buying time and time again. An item that has become a staple, an essential, an item that I simply must have on my bike.

It’s usually only come about from experience, and the process of using it (I’ve certainly never done it by sight), but every now and again I’ll come across an item and come to realise that “I’ve found the ****** that works for me.” Which I’ll then stick with.

I’ve previously written about the Brookes Cambium saddle, which has become one of these items and now none of my bikes feels complete without, and this time we’re going to look at another item that first appeared on the Ritchey. The King Cage.

Like the Brookes saddle, the King Cage was an item that I had wanted to fit to a bike but it didn’t look like it was going to suit my current ride. I’d fitted a pair of carbon fibre Lezyne bottle cages to the De Rosa, that were finished to look like the carbon fibre lay up in the the non-painted sections of the frame, and they looked like they were made for each other. Very much ‘matchy-matchy’. The very idea of replacing them with a pair of unpainted stainless steel cages almost seemed to be perverse.

When it came to the Ritchey build, the King Cages seemed to be the obvious choice. Leading up to that point I’d seen them fitted to pretty much all of John Watson’s bikes, over on The Radavist site, and I really liked how elegant they looked. For something so simple, and almost utilitarian in its construction, it still managed to look stylish.

In use, they perform like no other cage I’ve ever fitted. Gripping the bottle (never bidon) firmly, yet allowing it to be taken out and put back in with ease and without distraction. I’ve used plenty of aluminium cages in the past that were so stiff that they didn’t seem to want to let go, and carbon fibre cages where I have felt the need to be really careful when using them for fear of breaking them, when I should be concentrating on the road ahead. Plus, they don’t mark the bottles. And for someone who really likes looking after their things, and for their bike to look pristine, that’s pretty important.