The drill screams!
I took in a complete bike built on a GUSTO RCR Team frame from a customer (probably).
When they asked me for advice on whether to buy this frame, I gently said "pass," but if they're satisfied with it, that's fine. Brands that get hyped for "amazing value" are emphasizing that precisely because they have nothing else going for them. When a brand markets themselves like "if you calculate the component and wheel prices at MSRP, the frame is essentially free," they're already factoring in that buyers will do those calculations themselves. Commercially speaking, it's backwards—like the side dish becoming the main dish. But another certain brand that does this kind of marketing successfully spends real money sponsoring pro teams with frames to avoid picking up the image of being just "some sketchy no-name brand" that tends to cling to brands like this. So in this case, the customer only bought the frame. It's like being sold the leftover scraps from a complete bike that was broken down to harvest components and wheels—though admittedly they got it cheap enough—so I suggested they reconsider, but it was too late, the bike was already right in front of us. In case the shop that assembled the customer's parts onto this frame happens to read this: at least get the play out of the headset properly, geez.
The BIKESAND travel case in the background belongs to a different customer and has nothing to do with this job, just so you know.
The bottle cage position on the seat tube is high, and
when you insert a tall water bottle, it almost touches the top tube, so they wanted the position lowered. When using it for brevets, they attach a frame bag on the underside of the top tube, so at this position the bottle and bag would actually interfere with each other. That's also why there's a side-pull type bottle cage on the down tube.
I temporarily mounted the bottle cage using the lower hole on the seat tube and the upper hole on the cage itself.
If I were to create new threaded holes at this position, the seat tube would end up with three bottle cage holes total, but if inserting a bottle here would cause it to interfere with the frame, that's a problem.
There's no interference. If there's slight interference, you can choose a bottle cage with the threaded hole positioned lower—that would position the bottle slightly higher than the Minoura Dura Cage currently on there, avoiding the interference.
If there were serious interference regardless of the cage's hole position, we'd have to shift things "just a little," which would result in four threaded holes on the seat tube. In that case, I was planning to use a Shimano external battery offset adapter, SM-BA01, to handle it.
Drilled the pilot hole with a whirrrrr.
Drove in the rivet nut and
mounted the bottle cage.
Done.
I took in a complete bike built on a GUSTO RCR Team frame from a customer (probably).
The BIKESAND travel case in the background belongs to a different customer and has nothing to do with this job, just so you know.
The bottle cage position on the seat tube is high, and
when you insert a tall water bottle, it almost touches the top tube, so they wanted the position lowered. When using it for brevets, they attach a frame bag on the underside of the top tube, so at this position the bottle and bag would actually interfere with each other. That's also why there's a side-pull type bottle cage on the down tube.
I temporarily mounted the bottle cage using the lower hole on the seat tube and the upper hole on the cage itself.
If I were to create new threaded holes at this position, the seat tube would end up with three bottle cage holes total, but if inserting a bottle here would cause it to interfere with the frame, that's a problem.
There's no interference. If there's slight interference, you can choose a bottle cage with the threaded hole positioned lower—that would position the bottle slightly higher than the Minoura Dura Cage currently on there, avoiding the interference.
If there were serious interference regardless of the cage's hole position, we'd have to shift things "just a little," which would result in four threaded holes on the seat tube. In that case, I was planning to use a Shimano external battery offset adapter, SM-BA01, to handle it.
Drilled the pilot hole with a whirrrrr.
Drove in the rivet nut and
mounted the bottle cage.
Done.