Spocket’s Side-by-Side BTS Shows the Influence of the Slowtwitch Forum

Like many athletes, I have lost count of how many bottles I’ve launched off the back of my bike. And thanks to modern fueling demands, the need for packing hundreds of grams of carbs with you in those bottles isn’t going away anytime soon. If you run hydration behind your saddle, you know the drill. You bolt up some sort of BTS or maybe zip-tie a cage or both, then say a little prayer.

That’s been the deal for about two decades now. Lots of solutions have come our way over the last 18 months or so, but the issue still is present when it comes to a secure placement for your bottles. Wove itself did an amazing job with coming up with the BTS Bottle Cage that works well with not only regular bottles but also clamps down on the single-use plastic water bottle your original nutrition bottle gets replaced with at some point during a race. Then of course they created the very popular Bottle Retention Loop that keeps everything nice and tight regardless.

These are all products that were originally talked about and then born with the help of the Slowtwitch community. Now this is when things get a little fun. If you’ve spent any time in the Wove saddle thread , which has been going strong since 2022 — you’ve run into a user who goes by @sprocket. His real name is Thierry Guertin, and he has been active in our community since 2009. He is a big fan of the Wove brand, and at some point he got tired of the same BTS compromises the rest of us just live with. So he did the thing most of us only talk about doing. He built a better one.

What he came up with is the Spocket’s Side-by-Side BTS. It’s a CNC-machined carbon plate that sits on the tail of a Wove V8 or M8 and carries two cages side by side. This isn’t just a 3D-printed bracket held on with hope. The plate is routed from carbon, padded underneath while at the same time bolted down with titanium hardware. All of this comes in around 107 grams.

I first heard about this when I was talking with Nick from Wove about adding Wove saddles to the Slowtwitch Collective Shop. He talked to me about launching it with a small order of these new cool “BTS” unit that a Slowtwitcher had created and sent to him a week earlier. Before I committed I had Thierry send me one and within about 15 minutes of having one, I knew this was a winner and that It would become something people wanted.

I first noticed all the little details Thierry nailed. Carbon fiber base, the same tooling found on Wove’s own BTS system, as well as really thought out 3D parts that were well constructed and supported with solid hardware. And last but not least, the bracket that holds the mounting screws is a bike rack placement hook for transition.

If you’ve ever stood in a packed T1 trying to slide a bottle-loaded bike under a tight rack — and failed, and had to tilt it, and clipped your neighbor’s bike in the process — you get why this matters. The hook lets the bike hang clean with the bottles still mounted. And it also allows you to not screw up your brakes by putting your bike front facing on the rack either. It’s the kind of thing you design if you’ve raced and experienced these moments. On race morning, you’ll love it.

The other thing it nails is rigidity, which on a rear mount is the whole ballgame. We have seen it time and time again on IRONMAN Live Streams — the rear bottles get the worst vibration on the bike, and anything that flexes is going to spit a full bottle, and usually at the worst possible time. A one-piece carbon plate bolted solid to the saddle tail simply has less to wiggle loose. So needless to say I told Nick yes and called Thierry on WhatsApp (because, well…he’s from Canada, of course).

For more than twenty five years Slowtwitch has been where you go to figure out what to buy. You read reviews here that don’t just parrot the brand’s marketing. You take it to the forum, where a few hundred people who own the thing argued about it for a few dozen or hundred posts. And somewhere in there you, dear reader, landed on your own real opinion. And then you would go buy it (or not).

One of the fundamental things that our founder, Dan Empfield, knew was that the best gear in this sport doesn’t always come from the biggest brands. Of course, he also took matters into his own hands and built two of those big brands (Quintana Roo and Slowtwitch), but his expertise was always finding the things that were made by the small guys and helping them be noticed by a much bigger group of people. Especially at a time where those small guys couldn’t otherwise afford to get in front of large audiences with marketing campaigns. It’s been the way the world has worked. And it still is.

We carry Spocket’s Side-by-Side BTS on the Slowtwitch Collective shop. It’s why we built the shop in the first place: a problem from the forum, solved by a guy in the forum, is now sold in our shop. Think you need something, learn about it, then buy it, in the same place, from the same people who helped you sort it out. And it’s a big group effort. Thierry came up with the idea and mad the product. Wove helped him get the product in the USA so that they could ship the products and we use our platform to showcase it and so that it can sell. It’s a win win for everyone.

Here’s how the shop works: it’s a drop shipping collective and we like it that way. When you order from the shop, you are in touch with us and the company you are buying from and that should offer the customer the ultimate peace of mind. Two companies are involved and two companies want to make things right for you.

The idea of the shop comes down to three things:

1. Help our community introduce and be introduced to the things they want and need to buy.
2. Help our endemic brands sell products with less overhead than the current e-commerce world in which they are asked to compete for eyeballs with. Getting eyeballs on a product is very expensive and very time consuming.
3. It’s a new revenue stream for us. Being an open book, we make money on every sale.

How is it going? We are taking our time and learning. We have had a lot of really happy customers and we have really messed up a couple of orders. But we stand by our goals and we are excited to keep improving at delivering a key service to our community in what we believe will be a really cool thing for everyone.

So, is the Spocket Side-by-Side for you? It could be. Lots of carrier options in the market place. But if you’re riding on a Wove V8 (v1 or v2) or an M8, and you want something super sleek then it’s probably worth looking at. But a couple of other options stick out as well. Wove’s standard Double BTS bracket is one of them. Not riding on a Wove yet? We can help you check them out on our Shop, and we also carry the same 30 day money back guarantee as buying directly from Wove.

Check it out here

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