So what does Silca have in store for launch number three (of the four)? First there was the Ypsilon Y-Wrench. And after that Silca introduced the Pista Plus Floor Pump. Next comes a product based on the combination of Silca’s 40+ years of carbon fiber engineering and manufacturing experience with their 3-stage bottle cage testing protocols developed during Sicuro Titanium Cage development. The results is the Sicuro Carbon Bottle Cage.
The Sicuro Carbon Bottle Cage
Sicuro (meaning secure), was directly driven from hundreds of lab tests and analysis of high-speed video of cage behavior during these tests, plus more than a year of on road testing. The design of Sicuro Carbon focuses on three factors: perfectly matched geometry, lateral stability and vibration damping.
Silca tells us the majority of water bottle ejections from carbon cages happen because the cage fails to prevent the bottle from walking upward when exposed to certain frequencies of vibration. Others have tried to solve this by increasing grip force on the bottle, making it harder to insert and remove. The possible issue with this is that along with wearing out bottles, the tight grip can actually hold the bottle in a semi-ejected state as it walks upward when exposed to washboard type surfaces, perfectly placing it to be ejected with the next large impact.
Using their multi-axis shake rig and high speed cameras, Silca learned they could use less grip force combined with forward lip geometry and unique ‘wings’ on the sides of the cage to drive the bottle back down into the cage under these same frequencies. They learned that they could further eliminate walking of the bottle by adding a film of viscoelastic polymer to the layup, allowing the cage itself to reduce the vibration forces on the bottle. The result: No walking, no ejecting.
Silca also found that there is a huge effect that cage bolts play on cage fatigue life. Each Sicuro Carbon bottle cage comes with two of Silca’s Premium Titanium Mounting Bolts. Each bolt is machined in one operation from 6Al/4V Titanium on a Swiss Lathe. The low-profile flange head design of the bolt distributes load across nearly 3x more surface area than a cap screw and 2x the surface area of a button head for increased rigidity and lower stress. Sicuro Carbon Bottle Cages feature the same elongated mounting slots found on the Sicuro Titanium Bottle Cages. These elongated mounting slots give you 12mm of fore/aft adjustment to account for the variance in bottle boss location across different frame manufacturers.
Lastly, the bottom of SICURO Carbon bottle cages contain a unique accessory mounting platform, something Silca is excited to expand upon in the near future. (We noticed this as soon as we saw the images and are super curious to see what they have in store).
The Sicuro weighs in at a feather light 26g without the bolts and will set you back $70 per cage.
Our Thoughts
This is a product we are really curious about. We recently had another ultra-light carbon cage with a very similar design fail quite spectacularly after repeated insertion and removal of bottles. We want to see how the Sicuro stacks up. At $70 this is far from a cheap cage but not the most expensive we have seen, and actually is cheaper than some similar cages on the market. Like the PIsta Plus we will reserve judgment until we get a set in for long term test. As for Silca-day that makes three. Just one more Silca launch today!