Molle Water Bottle Holders and Accessory Pouches for the Flow Finder Waist Pack
The Flow Finder Waist Pack was designed with PALS attachment points for Molle-compatible accessories.
PALS stands for the ‘Pouch Attachment Ladder System’, and is a grid of webbing invented by the US Army to attach equipment to items like vests or backpacks. It’s found on a wide range of tactical equipment and is used to attach items such as holsters, magazine pouches, radio pouches, knife sheaths, and other gear.
There are lots of options for pouches available, making it an appealing design solution for gear and accessory expansion options for the Flow Finder Waist Pack.
The modular pouches and accessories are referred to as MOLLE, which stands for Modular Lightweight Load-carrying Equipment. There are a few modes of attachment for fastening accessory pouches. For mountain biking, we prefer accessories that use a reinforced webbing strap with a snap fastener.
Depending on the length of the ride and the destination, we'll change up our loadout. Sometimes we'll add pouches to hold our GoPro or camera. On longer rides, we'll add MOLLE water bottle holders. We'd like to supply the Flow Finder waist pack with water pouches of our design and make them in the USA. We've been debating this for a while, as we can purchase a set of imported pouches for less than our manufacturing cost, and since making our own felt like reinventing the wheel, we’ve been sourcing imported accessories for our use online.
That said, we're not super psyched on the options for carrying a cycling water bottle. Most of the imported water bottle holders are too big for a bike water bottle, or designed for a single-use throw-away bottle, and too small. (If there's enough demand, we'll follow through and get a run made of our design)
At the moment, our go-to bottle holders are these Camo molle water holders we bought on Amazon. They're sold under the 'Lake of Fire' brand, and cost $10 for a pair. They make them in two sizes, but Camo is just available in Medium.
However, they're not going to be for everyone, as they have some major flaws.
- They're too small for cycling water bottles. They were designed for throwaway bottles. However, if you prefer soft flask bottles, they're a good fit.
- The other issue is that the nylon fabric used for housing the drawstring is cheap/poorly made. I ripped it on the first ride. I ended up ripping the whole thing off. On the upside, they hold the soft flasks without issue.
There are a few pluses. One, the Camo fabric is a close match to the Cordura™ MultiCAM fabric we chose for the Camo Flow Finder, and they look good. They carry 500ml soft flask bottles well. They only have a single strap, though, so I notice a little movement.
If you’re looking to carry standard water bottles, the better option is this model you can find on Amazon with a "Gonex" brand label.
The Gonex Tactical MOLLE Water Bottle Pouch can be found here: https://amzn.to/4iYKaBq. We’d prefer to support another online retailer, but we haven’t found a model that is a better match for our requirements yet.
There are a few others like this one - we've been testing one with a "Halifoo" brand label, but the same item is available with other labels on it. The Gonex Molle Water Bottle Pouch isn't as tall, and it fits a bit closer to the PALS mounting points, and at the moment is the best option we've found for a cycling water bottle.