Thanks for the lead on the battery heated gear, Luis. I may go with something like that for my feet eventually.
Yesterday, since I knew this weekend's weather was going to be so wet and crappy (and seems to be living up to expectations so far), I took the day off and made a full day's ride up and through the mountains of New Hampshire. The temps were around 45 when setting out and
felt like they were dropping pretty significantly as I traveled northward and to higher altitudes. This provided a great opportunity to test out the First Gear Glacier gloves that I started this thread about, recently purchased from MotorcycleSuperstore.com, and received this past week. Here are my impressions:
Yes, these a nicely made, apparently fully weatherproof, all leather touring glove. Yes, the lack of insulation on the palm does allow the heat from a set of grips to penetrate to the palms of your hands quite nicely.
But!! The lack of insulation becomes a problem when the mercury drops low. When it's really cold out the tips of your fingers and all of your thumb will get frozen even though your palms are warmed nicely by your heated grips. For that reason, I would say that these gloves are a disappointment for me.
Yes, I will keep them as I think they will make a decent waterproof rain glove to wear in the summer months, and even early in the fall or late spring when the temps are merely cool. But they are no better (maybe even worse) than my fully insulated gauntlet leather gloves I was using previously when the weather is cold. My advice is not to expect these gloves to work well at too low of an ambient temperature.
Now for the good news story: After I rode for ~ 2hours with the First Gear gloves on, and my hands were pretty well chilled out, I stopped and switched over to my heated Gerbings Snowmobile gloves. My hands went from uncomfortably chilled to roasty toasty in no time. Further impressions will be posted in
this other thread I started.
And for those of you
suckers that had to work yesterday, a picture from along the side of Bear Notch Road.