Hello and welcome to the first of the mega updates.
After watching a pretty crap covered semi-final, Germany have won and I am in the mood to be critical.
A while back I wrote about the Furygan Orona textile jacket that I had finally found after over a year of searching. I wrote about all the little details of the jacket that set it apart from the rest. Well a detail that I never even thought about has become the main let down of this jacket, and that is the lining.
If you can imagine a basic, old school waterproof jacket. The ones that are like plastic. Well imagine that type of material inside a motorcycle jacket. Now imaging said jacket, apparently a “summer” jacket, in 24°c and what do you get? A big sweaty betty.
I wore this jacket for 7 days non-stop (with exception to sleeping.) I wore it through a variety of conditions, from raining to cold to scorching to really windy. And in most it performed really well. It remained completely dry within when I wore it in extreme downpours. It remained warm inside when it was both windy and cold.The thermal lining, which has space age tin foil stuff in it, was excellent and did the job perfectly.
However when it was sunny the jacket quickly became too hot inside resulting in very sweaty bodies. It was like wearing cling film in a sauna. This then threw up a few more problems like the uncomfortable inner elbow and wrist lining. The wrist closure is weird. It zips up to the edge of the cuff and also has a velcro closure as well, but I find that the zip makes the cuff very rigid, which makes putting gloves over the cuff quite sore. And it’s the only way you can wear gloves because there is no room to put them under the cuff. It was however quite nice, when it was really hot, to keep the zips open and have the gloves inside the wide cuff.
The thermal lining, whcih is meant to keep one warm when it’s a bit chilly, was pretty handy to remove this discomfort. I even started using it even when it was sunny because it removed the crap lining from my skin. It may just be me, but I think the tin foil thing actually acted as a thermostat, keeping me cool in the blazing sun….great.
This is a pretty bad issue considering that this is meant to be a summer jacket. You would think that a mesh or light fabric would be used inside a summer jacket, and not a plastic like non-breathable liner.
A few more points of interest are the rigidness of the jacket. The outer has a lot of small padded areas stitched in to it, which looks really smart, but makes the jacket quite rigid. This means that when you get on the bike and sit, the whole jacket seems to ride up, making shoulder checks and other movements quite forced. It’s not a very natural fit.
So really what I am saying is, this jacket is more suited to colder summer days, the ones where you need that bit more heat retention rather than dissipation. It is perfect for Autum I would suggest and perhaps the odd warmer winter day, as the thermal lining is excellent. However due to uncomfortable lining and very uncomfortable wrists, this is certainly a jacket that is needing some improvement.
I still think it’s a superb looking jacket and if there was some attention on the negatives, it could be a brilliant jacket.
On the flip side, the relief came when I took the thermal lining out my RST Paragon jacket. It has a mesh liner and it a joy to wear when it’s hot. A good all rounder, if only it was waterproof.
Thanks for looking and stay tuned for more gear updates.
Cheers
Gordon
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