The European Safer Urban Motorcycling group put out a booklet recently entitled “Protective Equipment for Riders” (get the English language version here) which attempts to educate scooter and motorcyclists on the benefits of wearing protective gear.

There’s an accepted acronym among serious riders — ATGATT — which stands for “All The Gear, All The Time.” This phrase means wearing gloves, jacket, pants, boots, and a helmet specially made for motorcycling or scooters.

The real debate for us ATGATT folk isn’t “should I wear a jacket,” but “what’s the relative protection of textile versus mesh?” or “is nylon mesh more or less dangerous than wearing polyester mesh,” or “how long can one reasonably expect to slide in 1.5mm goatskin leather without wearing through to the skin?”

And boy would I love for an independent lab to test my old buddy Wayne’s MotoPort kevlar gear.

I hoped that the booklet by eSUM would address some of these questions. You might think buying “all the gear” to wear “all the time” would be the end of it, but in reality it’s just the beginning. There is a shitload of materials, types of armor, brand name materials, rebranded materials, and exotic stuff out there. My Rev’It Cayenne Pro has ceramic-plated textile in high skid areas. That sounds bad ass, but has anyone independently tested this?

Unfortunately, the “Protective Equipment for Riders” pamphlet only states the obvious: you should wear protective motorcycle gear. I hate to say this, but motorcyclists are in one of two camps. They either wear all the gear, or they don’t. No one really needs convincing, and motorcyclists are do-it-my-own-way as a bunch, and you can’t tell us what to do. We have to make up our own minds to do something. The decision to wear enough gear to be called a Power Ranger may be the result of research, or it might be because someone went down at 25MPH and had to deal with road rash for months.

The eSUM book is basically worthless. It either speaks on deaf ears to those who won’t wear gear no matter what facts are put in front of them, or preaches to the choir who has more detailed questions.

I’d hoped to put together an independent testing lab for motorcycle gear, and maybe someday I’ll do just that. In the meantime, motorcyclists only have anecdotal evidence from those of us unfortunate riders who “live tested” their gear.

The biggest problem for me with riding a motorcycle mid-distance is “saddle comfort.” That’s a nice way of saying that my butt, legs, and knees start to hurt after awhile. Lack of circulation is the major culprit. There are a few causes for this, and over the years I have done my best to mitigate them:

1. Too soft or too hard of a seat (what makes a seat too soft or too hard depends a lot on a person’s body).
2. Seams of underwear, pants, or riding pants that pass under the legs. These create pressure points.
3. Being able to move your feet and legs around. Ideally this means highway pegs, although I can’t do that safely on my FJR.

Some riders put “toppers” on their seats to help with blood flow and heat management. Folks who don’t wear wicking bottoms or ride in street clothes often have a problem with rashes associated with heat and sweat. This is called “monkey butt” in the motorcycling world. I’ve never experienced it, but encouraging airflow and temperature management seems to help. A sheepskin pad (fluffy side up) is supposed to help with monkey butt and adds a little bit of comfort to a ride, but I don’t think it would help in my case.

The other topper people frequently try is the BeadRider, which is a motorcycle-version of the beaded seat cover made famous by taxi drivers. One of my co-workers has one and absolutely raved about it. Apparently it works by distributing your weight across the beads so that you don’t develop any “hot spots” on your butt. I was skeptical that something as hard as a mat of beads would help my riding comfort, but I was willing to try.

I should have trusted my instincts.
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I’ve started taking some photographs while motorcycling. I bought a used Canon PowerShot SD700IS from eBay for about $100 and already had an SD card lying around. I take most of my shots while moving, using my left hand to operate all the controls of the camera.

I keep the camera in my left front pocket. When I wore my Rev’It Cayenne Pro this was no big deal: the jacket’s large, top-load pockets made it easy to get the camera out and put it back again. However, I now wear the Rev’It Turbine since the weather is warmer. As I mentioned in my review, the Turbine has traditional side-mounted vertical pockets that are hard to get into and out of with a full sized gauntlet glove. This makes grabbing the camera even more awkward, since my hand is now closed around something and less likely to escape the pocket without difficulty.

Worried about dropping my camera on the road, I stopped taking as many pictures as I wanted. I read that a few riders secured their cameras to their bikes via a retractable lanyard. Think of a heavy duty janitor keychain that zips a big ring of keys back to a belt. Gear Keeper makes a whole swath of retractable lanyards, and the RT20012 seemed to be highly regarded on ADVrider.com

I put in an order for one via a vendor on Amazon, and it arrived a few days later.
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You encounter (or perhaps create) all sorts of new challenges when you ride a motorcycle more than you drive a car. There are obvious ones: dealing with rain by obtaining waterproof gear; adding a topcase and panniers for luggage capacity. But there are some creature comforts that you take for granted in a car that you don’t have on a bike. Sometimes it’s nice to be able to talk to someone you’re traveling with, and sometimes it’s nice to listen to something other than wind noise.

I tried using my old BMW K1200LTE’s onboard intercom and radio to solve these problems, but the concept of a wired headset seemed problematic. Furthermore, the “compatible” headsets I purchased were not, and I wasn’t interested in spending $260 for a pair of the approved BMW headsets. I wound up selling the KT1200LTE anyway, and I put my comm search on hold.

That is, until I found out about the Scala Cardo Q2 Bluetooth motorcycle intercom. They were wireless, had a built-in FM tuner, an AUX jack for an MP3 player / satellite radio, and a range of up to 500′. This meant that I could talk with my passenger, or perhaps another riding buddy. I am really glad I didn’t spring for those wired headsets now.

Would the Cardo Scala Q2 headset meet my expectations? Unfortunately there’s still a long way to go to make these live up to the hype.
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Here’s the problem. You stay pretty motionless while riding a motorcycle. This makes it hard for the body to generate heat to keep warm. This is a major problem while riding at high speeds in cold temperatures. I got frostbite my first year of riding on my toes because I wasn’t adequately protected from the elements.

It’s been a major struggle of mine to keep my hands warm in anything below 40°F at highway speeds. Heated grips and handguards help, but you really need special purpose gloves to keep your hands warm. The problem with buying winter gloves is that they tend to be very bulky. The insulation material makes the gloves look more like a ski mitt than a motorcycle glove, and the fine manipulation required to work the throttle can become lost. I own a pair of Tour Master winter gloves, and it feels like I am not touching the controls at all.

Rev’It makes several winter gloves. Thanks to Dennis over at Beach Moto, I selected the Fahrenheit H2O waterproof winter motorcycle glove. He helped me with the sizing, suggesting an XL that fit perfectly.

Would Rev’It’s high technology help me overcome my cold hand blues?
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The first half of my ride home from Georgia was great. I was moving along at a good clip, and the sun was bright and shining.

That is, until I got to Fayetteville, North Carolina.

Fayetteville seems to be the tipping point for bad motorcycle weather. On my trip down, my route south of Fayetteville was completely covered by rain. I guess the northern part of my return trip got jealous and wanted to get in on the “fun.”

It rained non-stop, and hard, all the way home. It wasn’t as bad as my trip down, but it was a soaking rain. Paranoid (and hopefully wiser) from my gear problems on the way down, I adjusted my waterproofing strategy slightly.
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The first half of my trip down to Georgia was fantastic. It was cool enough that I wasn’t hot in my Rev’It Cayenne Pro jacket, but not so cold my hands were freezing. It was overcast enough that I didn’t have to squint behind my Native sunglasses, but not so overcast that I had to worry about rain.

That is, until I got to Fayetteville, North Carolina. Then the sky opened up. It didn’t stop until I reached Savannah, some 280 miles later.

What followed was a near total failure of every piece of waterproof motorcycling gear that I owned. Am I being too harsh?
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I was supposed to go visit my family up in Syracuse, NY this weekend. I was going to ride Raider up there and then putter around with my stepfather. I quickly encountered two monkey wrenches.

1) The bike my dad owned does not have a state inspection. Neither does Raider, but he won’t ride without a 100% legal bike. So a paired ride is out of the picture.

2) It is supposed to rain the entire time I am there. The thing about Syracuse is that the temperature could drop at any time. I’d go from rain to snow in a hurry. Who wants to be caught in that?

So, tell me what you’d choose:
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Almost four months ago, I was killing time in a coffee shop in California. I was visiting family and had a PT Cruiser rental car instead of my motorcycles, and I was missing my two-wheeled friends badly. I made up for it by reading motorcycle gear reviews, and found read Web Bike World’s review of the Rev’It Cayenne Pro textile jacket and pants. I wanted it.

At the same time, my friend Fish Sprout was researching Motoport’s kevlar textile gear, mostly because her friend owned a set. The Cayenne Pro, despite ingenious venting options, was still a three-season jacket. Motoport owners reported wearing the jacket in temperatures from the 30s to 120s. The lure of a strong, four-season textile suit that wouldn’t melt to your skin like most mesh led me to order jacket and pants from Motoport in late June.

It was a huge mistake. For a product promising a “custom” fit, my Motoport jacket was put together for someone who weighed an extra twenty or thirty pounds. I sent it back twice for alterations, and am still in the process of getting my money back.

Cold temperatures were fast approaching, and I hadn’t solved the problem of a weather-resilient jacket that would hold up well in a crash. My Tourmaster Transition 2 jacket fit well and had nice features, but claims of the jacket disintegrating in crashes as slow as 25MPH made me nervous.

I bit the bullet, and bought the jacket from Beach Moto, run by a member of the ADVrider.com community. Dennis, the owner, was everything Motoport wasn’t, and should have been — responsive, personable, professional, and efficient. Did I mention that dealing with Beach Moto was easy and didn’t make me feel like an idiot? Motoport, take notice.

However, I’m getting ahead of myself. On to the jacket.
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I bought my first pair of Held Ninja gloves a little over three years ago. They had a manufacturing flaw where the stitching around the fingers began to give way. I returned them to the Held distributor, who sent me a new pair that was sewn together by Igor. Less than a year later, the right glove began to deteriorate near the wrist. A small hole developed, which eventually grew into a larger hole. If the gloves fell apart under normal wear and tear, what would happen in a crash? I started looking for another glove.

I researched a few other full gauntlet gloves with the help of Web Bike World, ADVrider.com, and the FZ6 forum over on sportbikes.net. I was chugging the Motoport Kool-Aid and bought a pair of the kevlar motorcycle gloves. I tried two pair but the fit was off (omen), and I returned them.

I purchased a pair of Teknic Speedstar full gauntlet leather gloves from NewEnough and have worn them for about 1500 miles. Priced at $99 on closeout, the Speedstars won out against the Alpinestar SP-1, Cortech Adrenaline, and Shift Carbine gloves. I considered some of the Rev’It gloves, but the lack of full wrist protection steered me away.
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