Cannondale Nylon SSL Water Bottle Cage

Cannondale has a small range of branded bottle cages, and the Nylon SSL is one of the cheaper ones, being made out of plastic. It offers good side access to the bottle, which is an advantage to those with smaller frames, but it didn't hold onto the bottle reliably enough for us to really recommend it.

We reviewed its posher cousin, the Evo Carbon, a while ago, which didn't fare very well, and I'm afraid the news is only a little better this time. This cage is available in two variants, each the mirror image of the other. It's designed such that the bottle comes out quite easily to one side (and not very easily to the other), so you can take your pick from the SSL and the SSR. Bear in mind, though, that because of the location of the mounts on most bikes, you'll almost certainly need one of each if you're going to fit two.

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The SSL offers easy access from the left when mounted to the down tube, and from the right when mounted to the seat tube. Unusually, it's moulded in two pieces; here one is white and the other black. You can get a few other colour combinations to suit your bike too. Cannondale says that this is to allow the use of two different "durometers" of nylon, by which I am assuming it means stiffness. I couldn't honestly identify which was supposed to be the stiffer, and I half suspect that aesthetic reasons rather than material ones were the main justification.

And it does look pretty snazzy, I'd say, especially for a relatively cheap plastic cage. The white part is in the shape of the Cannondale "C" logo; branding is otherwise quite subtle, with the only printed logo located on the inside, underneath the bottom of the bottle.

A slight downside to the two-part construction is that it is a little more fiddly to fit to your bike (the mounting bolts secure the two halves together), but not by a whole lot. The mounting holes are actually slots, making it suitable if your bike has non-standard spacing between bosses.

Weighing in at 47g, marginally lower than the claimed weight, it's similar to other plastic or metal bottle cages; if you stretch to a carbon cage it'll be around half that, although we're talking pretty small differentials. Plastic bottle cages start at around half the cost of this one – here you're paying for the unusual design and the Cannondale brand.

Side-access cages can make it a bit easier to grab your bottle, as long as you remember to use the correct hand, but their main advantage is for use in smaller frames, where extracting a larger bottle can be quite fiddly otherwise. I found that it was pretty easy getting a bottle in and out, so it passes that part of the test.

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The other key requirement is that it doesn't release the bottle without you wanting it to, and here it was less of a success. On the mostly smooth roads of Spain, where spent a few days riding, it held on without any issue for several hundred kilometres, but I found on the UK's winter roads it was less reliable.

On more than one occasion an unintended foray into a pothole resulted in the bottle flying out. The cause seems to be a combination of the relatively flexible nylon that the cage is made from and that the side-access design doesn't hug the bottle as tightly as some. It was particularly an issue with larger (750ml) bottles, but as there are plenty of bottle cages available without this flaw it does make it quite hard to recommend, unless you live somewhere with nicer roads than the UK.

Verdict

Smart-looking plastic cage with easy side access; you might lose your bottle though