On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 1:09 PM, ternst <ternst1@cox.net> wrote:
> On the double bottles on bars, the old time guys of nostalgic bygone eras
> had entirely different bike designs on wheelbases, fork rakes, head angles.
>
This matches what I found when I put a full bottle on the front one my favorite handling mid-trail bikes. Just like it didn't like a handlebar bag, this bike's steering over-reacted to weight on the handlebar, and not in a way that you'd get used to it. I found that front end geometry that likes a handlbar bag (trail 45mm or so, or less) also likes a water bottle on the front, and I notice that low trail was a more common racing geometry in the 60s and 50s. Mid trail geometry that dislikes a handlebar bag (50-58mm or so) doesn't like a heavy water bottle either. My bottle placement exaggerated the effect by hanging it off the end of a 14cm Cinelli 1A stem, so there may be ways to make this work ok on mid-trail bikes.
Mitch Harris
Little Rock Canyon, Utah, USA