Wednesday, June 08, 2011

New hot weather riding gloves

I've had several pairs of Olympia gloves in my 30+ years of motorcycling and have come to regard Olympia as a quality brand, so I wasn't particularly worried when I bought a pair of Olympia 711 Gel Reflector Motorcycle Sport Gloves.
The BMW Air-Flow gloves I'd bought for summer riding in 2006 are finally gel glovesfalling to pieces, so I took a chance on these gloves.
I just completed a 300-mile ride through the Mid-South (Brookland, Ark. to Cape Girardeau, Mo., and back). The temperature was 79 when I left home and 95 when I returned. The gloves are noticeably cooler than their BMW predecessors and my hands felt cool, yet protected, throughout the ride.
The gel in the palm, which makes the handgrips seem slightly larger, took a little getting used to, but I was completely comfortable with it by the end of the ride.
The fit of the XL gloves is excellent - it's almost as if they were custom made for my hands - and enhances the accuracy of my taps on the touch screen of my Garmin Zumo 550 GPS. It's impossible to be precise with some gloves, but these are like having no gloves at all when it comes to working the Garmin's features.
I tested the reflector spots with a flashlight the night the gloves arrived and didn't notice any reflectivity at all. Maybe the guys at the factory forgot the reflective material the day mine were made. That's no big deal because the rest of my apparel and my bike are loaded with reflective stuff.
The closest thing I can find to a flaw is that the inner seams of the fingertips could have been trimmed a little more. But considering how well everything else about the gloves performs, that's hardly a deal-breaker.

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