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skuke wrote:

I considered using the mounting bolts from a stem face plate, but I thought you had a one piece Calfee CF stem/bar so I didn't mention it.

Then, after having thought about it for a bit, I decided the face plate or it's bolts was not a good idea anyhow. I would not take the risk of additional load and vibration on a area of the bike where catastrophic failure would mean significant injury. There are already enough known problems with stems, face plates, and the bolts (not necessarily Ritchey) without adding additional stresses. If your stem is aluminum, Google aluminum stress fractures, and aluminum catastrophic failures.

By clamping to the spacer, a failure would mean that you'd drop the bottle and assembly. Yeah, it could get tangled in the front wheel, but that is unlikely and the risk of that would be better than a face plate failing.

FWIW, I was a R&D machinist for 25 years, hence my design background. I an now an RN in a trauma intensive care unit. I've seen my share of bicycle accidents and some where mechanical failures. Unfortunately, I also knew somebody who died from failure of their stem. So attaching to the face plate is not a recommendation I'd give.

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Skuke,

Thanks for the help. It is great to have someone with your experience in the group. You just saved me a lot of time trying to figure out how to make this work.

Well, I have since backed away from the idea of using a tube to get water from a Camelbak or a bottle. Camelbak makes a bottle that accepts a tube with a bite value. It is necessary to add additional tubing so that the hose reaches up and clamps on the collar of a cycling jersey. This does work, but there doesn't appear to be an easy way of draining the excess water from the tube. This can be a potential problem for mold and bacteria. So, I decided to just stick with bottles and bottle cages. It is a much simpler and cheaper solution.

Bruce

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