I made it through several Indiana summers with a BMW AirFlow jacket, but found it was a little toasty for blazing hot Arkansas summer riding. So I bought a silver Fieldsheer mesh jacket that was on sale at Grass Roots BMW back around the spring of 2008. It was cheaply made and had a liner that didn’t breathe very well but it had armor in all the right places and let the cool air in.
Then, at the BMW MOA Rally in Johnson City, Tenn., in 2009, I got seduced by a Fieldsheer High-Viz mesh jacket. It
was a longer jacket with generous pocket space and made me feel a little safer for being conpicuous. The liner doesn’t breathe very well, but I have windstopper stuff that I wear under it to much better effect. I wore it to MotoGP in Indy and Colorado in 2009 and on my three-week tour of the West last summer with no complaints.So I wasn’t really in the market for another mesh jacket last week when I stumbled across a closeout sale of the Firstgear MeshTex jacket, which normally sells for about $150, going for $29 at Motorcyclegear.com. I had just bought a pair of Firstgear MeshTex pants for a mere $59 (MSRP $150) from Motorcyclegear.com and jumped on the opportunity to complete the ensemble with a jacket that zips to the pants. The only color they had left in my size was blue, but that’s fine with me since my bike is blue. The jacket arrived yesterday and I was pleased to see it’s much better constructed and armored than the Fieldsheer jackets. So I ended up with a $300 Firstgear MeshTex riding ensemble for $90 plus shipping.
I apparently acted just in time, because the $29 jackets are all gone this morning and the size choices in pants are dwindling rapidly.
So I now have four mesh, flow-through jackets hanging in the foyer closet, stuffed in among the cold weather riding gear that doesn’t see nearly as much use as it did in Indiana.
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