Profile Design RM1 Bottle Cages–Final Review

Hydration is one of the most important aspects of triathlon success.  There are any number of different approaches to hydration and I think your tester witnessed all of them last weekend at Beach2Battleship.  We observed standard bottle cages, NeverReachs, Speedfils, and even a few folks strapping on CamelBaks for the ride.

Here at FitEgg, we’ve tried quite a few different hydration options and generally don’t like installing bottle cages on our downtube and seattube.  A few months ago, during our Ironman training, we picked up a RM1 setup from Profile Design.  The RM1 is a rear bottle mount system that holds two bottles at a slight angle.  The RM1 mounts to your saddle rails and allows some adjustment up and down to get the angle of the bottles correct.  The RM1 also includes threaded mounts for your CO2 cartridges.  The RM1 can be picked up for about $40 at your local tri or bike store or online for a few dollars less, plus shipping.  The RM1 is available in black and white.

Profile Design RM1 Bottle Cage Construction:

The RM1 is constructed from 6061-T6 aluminum.  This makes for a lightweight setup.  The bottle cages have a bottom bracket to hold the bottles in and feature a flexible cage with a rubber band to grip the bottle.  In addition to the cages, the package comes with two aluminum tabs with threaded holes for your CO2 cartridges.  These tabs are attached to the RM1 by removing the cages and installing the tabs between the cages and the mounts. It’s easier than it appears at first.

Performance of Profile Design RM1 Bottle Cages:

We hooked these cages up to our test road bike with the Adamo Century Seat.  The Adamo Century has a small lip under the seat which required us to fiddle with the angle of the bottles.  We also took a few extra moments to install the CO2 holders.  All told, the installation process took less than 20 minutes.

On our first ride, we lost a bottle at a railroad crossing.  We noticed that the angle of the bottle cages had dropped a little since our installation and made a note to install the bolts with a little Teflon tape or Locktite to make sure road vibration didn’t back the bolts out again.

The RM1 cages changed the feel of our test bike a bit, moving some of the weight we normally carried under the rider to the back of the seat.  Our tester quickly became accustomed to this setup, but it did cause some balance changes on the first few rides.

The cages are easy to access from all standard positions.  When you tuck into the aero position, it requires a little practice to reach back to grab the bottles, but it’s completely doable.  That said, if you have shorter arms, you might need to get out of your tuck before you can access the bottles.

The CO2 tabs looked very good installed and the CO2 cartridges were easy to access.  Of course, you have to purchase threaded CO2 cartridges for these tabs to work.  After about 300 miles with the cages installed, we lost a CO2 cartridge from the threads.  Road vibration must have caused it to back out of the threads.  After that, we added one wrap of Teflon tape to the threads of the CO2 cartridge and never had another problem with the cartridges backing out.

Final Impression of the Profile Design RM1:

For the price, this is a well made product that delivers adequate performance.  We only had one long standing issue with the RM1: dropping bottles.  We only tested this on our Adamo seat and we dropped a bottle at least every 300 miles, particullarly when working with a full bottle and bumpy roads.  To increase the grip of the cages, we added a thicker rubber band to hold the bottle tighter.  This modification seemed to solve most problems, although we dropped a bottle during Beach2Battleship, even with the thicker rubber band.  One of the stock rubber bands broke after a few weeks of use and needed replacement, not a big deal, but still a bit of a pain.

We installed this cage on an extra seat, not mounted to a bike, and noticed that the angle seemed to be a bit higher with a standard seat, which could prevent dropped bottles.  We also noticed that using a thicker bottle, namely insulated bottles, reduced the dropped bottle problem.

We would like to see Profile Design modify the RM1 to accommodate the Adamo series seats.

We liked the CO2 tabs and found them very useful.

We would like to have way to mount an extra tube on the RM1.  If Profile Design offered another set of tabs that allowed you to tape or attach a tube, this would greatly increase the usability of this product.

Overall, we were pleased with the RM1 from Profile Design.  If you ride an Adamo seat, you might experience the bottle dropping that we did and we believe that under a regular seat you would have less problems.  If you’re committed to using bottles, you can’t find another rear cage system for at this price point that will outperform the RM1.  That said, we believe Profile Design needs to improve the construction of this product to make it more functional under Adamo seats.