Saddle Bottle Mount · Cameron Magari

A friend of mine was training for an Ironman and ran into a simple problem: a road bike has room for two bottles inside the frame, and a 112-mile ride needs more water than that. Rather than buy something, I designed and printed a rack that clamps onto the saddle rails and carries two more bottles behind the seat — out of the way, out of the wind, and off the frame entirely.

Figure 1. The mount in place under the saddle, loaded with two bottles.

The design clamps to the saddle rails rather than tapping into any of the frame's existing bosses, so nothing about the bike has to change to fit it. The main body is a single printed bracket: it wraps the rails at the front, cantilevers back behind the seat, and ends in a flat plate drilled for a pair of standard bottle cages. A separate cap closes over the rails and pulls down onto the body with two bolts, sandwiching the rails between the two halves. Because the cages bolt on with the usual two-screw pattern, they're ordinary parts — the printed piece is the only thing that had to be made.

Figure 2. Exploded view: the printed body and rail cap, the clamp hardware, and two off-the-shelf cages.

The one piece of pure personality is their last name embossed down the side of the bracket. It costs nothing on a printed part — it's just geometry in the CAD model — but it turns a utility bracket into something that's obviously theirs. Printing it in red to match their frame didn't hurt either.

Figure 3. The printed mount installed on the bike, with one cage fitted.