King of Cages

Ron Andrews doesn’t just make some of the finest water bottle cages and accessories in the world, he makes the tools that make them too.

- Ben Brashear

Ron Andrews is quickly moving around his basement workshop. Short-cropped gray hair extends beyond his Bula hat. His hands, when they are not reaching for a square tabbed washer or a length of quarter inch tubing to build his water bottle cages, fold into the front pocket of his hoodie. The words "Lighten up Pal" appear in bright yellow across the back, a reference to the weight savings of the titanium he builds with, but also to the way he approaches his designs.

"Making cages goes back to about '91," he says, "It kind of happened by chance." He picks up a long length of quarter-inch titanium tubing, left over from the aviation industry, and extends his hand out toward more than 300 cages hanging from a large roller rack. "We used to have a guy that could crank out over 100 cages in an hour for five hours straight." Andrews smiles as he feeds the length of tubing into the first bender.

A lathe and mill, among myriad tools, hardened steel pivots and scrap metal have all helped Andrews design and create the one-off custom tooling required to assemble his water bottle cages and toe-clips he has been selling as King Cage since 1993 from Durango, Colorado. "I don't use CAD. I hand draw my designs but I can't draw in 3D, so I kind of envision what I need to make and then start shaping and milling parts," he says.

It takes Andrews about a week to build and perfect a new tool whenever he wants to produce a new style of product. And judging from the pile of toe-clips, handlebar bells that double as shot glasses and the massive fat bike bottle cage sitting on the finishing station, he does it quite often.