Since I happened to have the scale and camera nearby, I put the cages on the scale before I mounted them onto the appropriate bike. Lo and behold, this is what I found.
I should let everyone know that although I may be a weight conscious sort of person, I'm not a super weight weenie. So I won't spend $300 to take 20 grams off my bars but I will spend money if I need something and it happens to take some weight off the bike. I needed bottle cages, but since I don't really think they're worth more than $20 or $30 each, I decided not to get sucked into the "lightest cage" contest, one full of very blingy $50-100 cages.
I picked up a pair of Specialized cages, blue, with a reasonable design to prevent bottle depth charging. $30 for the pair, $14.99 each. These cages actually fell below my perceived value for a cage. Heck, I may even buy four more for the tandem.
The Elite aluminum cage for which I think I paid $10 or 20 each, ended up weighing a massive 86 grams apiece.
The Specialized cages a more reasonable 39 grams apiece.
This netted me a 47 gram loss per cage, a number close to the 45 grams by which I convert grams to pounds - 45.4 grams is a tenth of a pound. Each Specialized cage, then, was a tenth of a pound lighter than the Elite cages.
So with the two Specialized cages installed, the bike weighed 0.2 pounds less.
For $30 that's not a bad thing.
I tug a bit harder to pull bottles out of the Specialized cages, but I figure that's not really a bad thing if it helps keeps bottles reined in to the bike. I'll have to go see how this security translates to the real world.
In other words, I'm off to ride the bike.
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