Before and After Storage and Hydration Improvement

Here's what the on-bike storage and water bottle setup looked like with the Novara seat wedge (modified by adding a Twofish Bikeblock pump mount to push it further back from the seat post to enhance leg clearance while pedaling) and SKS Tool Wrap:

To recap why I was looking to make a change, the tool roll under the top tube made it inconvenient to access tools held within, and I wanted to carry more than 1.7 liters of water while keeping the Nalgene OTG bottle (the red bottle on the down tube) as my primary bottle and without resorting to a hydration bladder.

Here is how things look with the seat wedge and tool roll consolidated into the Banjo Brothers medium sized frame pack:

The frame bag is installed backwards because it fit better on my frame that way. With this setup, the water bottles are a bit hard to access, so I moved the down tube cage, the Origin8 Articul-8er, which is adjustable to be side or front entry, to the seat tube because it fits as close to the frame as possible, increasing room for the bag slightly.  I may end up using a vertical adjustment gizmo to lower the seat tube bottle as low as possible for even more room for the bag.

In its place on the down tube, I put the Zefal Wiiz side entry cage.  It is working OK, but has a a couple of problems.  Firstly, it stands off the frame quite a bit, which eats into bag room.  Secondly, it doesn't hold very tightly so lost bottles is a possibility, though with the frame bag in the way, that's quite unlikely.  But it does have the advantage of being very easy to draw and holster the bottle.

I forgot to take a photo of this current configuration, but it doesn't look substantively different.

The final changes were adding the behind the seat bottle cage in place of the Novara seat wedge to hold one additional bottle.  In the photo, it is holding the one liter Elite Maxi Cincio.  I was rightly concerned that such a large bottle could be problematic while swinging a leg over the saddle, but I can probably deal with it as long as I remember when the bottle is there, or stick to smaller bottles.

I used to have a Cygolite Hotshot Pro 80 tail light on the seat wedge's rear light loop and a Portland Design Works Radbot 1000 tail light on the left seat stay, but with the seat wedge gone, I rearranged the tail lights a little.

I put the Hotshot on the left seat stay and put the Radbot on the seat post, just below the bottle cage.  One pleasant surprise was that when using a clear water bottle, e.g. the Maxi Cincio, the tail light makes the whole water bottle glow red.  I don't know how that affects visibility with a larger, but dimmer/diffuse light, but it's certainly an interesting look.  With no third bottle in place, the seat post tail light is mostly unobstructed.

Once I trim off the excess velcro, the bike should be ready to go on a test ride.  I'd like to keep the velcro intact so that I might have the option of returning the bag for a somewhat smaller one, but I'm probably going to keep it since return shipping would be prohibitive and the smaller bags might not be able to hold everything I would want anyway.

Hopefully I can post a "final" photo of the setup along with a ride report soon.