The New Tor Jacket Earns Its Keep
All the safety with none of the weight
I’ve 130km to go before I get to my destination. I’m riding a recently collected new and rather marvellous Yamaha Tenere 700. I’ve already covered 140km and it’s starting to get properly wet as what has been the occasional drizzle starts to get more enthusiastic. It’s also starting to get dark and I’m regretting not starting out on my journey earlier.
A number of years ago I made a fairly substantial error on track and properly highsided a Fireblade. On reflex I put out my hands and landed heavily on the left one. What should have been a very complicated crushed scaphoid was avoided, with the energy breaking my wrist further up in a way that was easy to fix and has had no long lasting ill effects.
The reason that I got away with this was because I was wearing a pair of Handroid gloves from Knox. Their scaphoid protection system saved the day and I’ve been a big fan of the company and their products ever since.
Today I’m wearing their soft shell jacket from their Dual Pro 3 in 1 jacket. This doesn’t look like a bike jacket, rather it looks distinctly casual. It also has six pockets. I’m wearing a new Tor armoured shirt under it, rather than the standard Knox one that comes with the jacket.
Remarkably effective!
I like this new shirt, and I like it a lot. It’s designed to be worn in place of a traditional jacket in good weather. There’s a full suite of armour on the elbows, shoulders and the back. All of which is Knox’s own Micro-Lock. It’s lightweight and sits in a body made from strong nylon that, because it’s completely ventilated, feels so light that it doesn’t even cause a gentleman such as myself to perspire.
The clever design continues with five pockets, a built in visor wipe in one, a key clip in another and are all zipped with no Velcro or fiddly fasteners. The finish is exactly what I’ve come to expect from the UK company. Reflective subtle branding and piping, a clever ‘perfect fit’ cuff closer as well as an independent outer shell which is stuffed into the back pocket that promises to be waterproof.
Between the two I’ve got no fewer than 11 pockets. Ryanair can take their luggage charges and shove them where the sun doesn’t shine!
Tyrones A5, Possibly the Worst Road in Ireland
The soft shell on the outer jacket is ‘hydrophobic’. This means that on a city commute it’ll keep most of the rain out. However, out here in the wilds and at my ‘enthusiastic’ speeds, I find that it’s not the environment that is was designed to be used in. Contemplating the next 130km of awful weather I pull into a service station and go looking for that outer shell.
This thing about it is the tiny amount of space which it takes up. A rolled up refuse bag would be bigger. What I find when I open it up is a simple one piece nylon pullover. It’s elasticated on the cuffs and waist and has a relatively high neck with a drawstring. It’s a sort of silver colour and has loads of reflective qualities without being a HiVis vest! There’s nothing to it and I’m not at all sure that it’s going to work.
I pull it over my shoulders, pull the waist down, finding it covers the full length of my jacket , tighten the drawstring and head back out into the night.
When I ride my bike, particularly in the winter I don’t mind getting a little bit wet. The cold does bother me, but I expect to get water in somewhere. If it’s not a compromise in the clothing then it’s down to me leaving a fastener undone or a vent open. On a journey of this length with consistent rain I’m going to get wet and it’s as simple as that.
Not all van drivers are out to get you...
The thing about the rain and being wet however is that it’s attention sapping. A t-shirt that’s full of water from the neck to the chest is uncomfortable. A rivulet of rain water running down my spine is distracting.
Riding on and approaching the outskirts of a regional town and I catch with a procession of slow moving vehicles. Standing up on the pegs of the Tenere I could see that there was a large tractor trundling along at less than half the speed limit. The bikes speedo reads 40kph and there’s no hard shoulder for the big John Deere to move into. The speed limit was 100. As frustrating as I find this the overtaking opportunities were limited with a narrow and twisty road that had a fair bit of oncoming traffic. Since I knew that we were a kilometre from the towns speed limit I slowed down and abandoned any thoughts of filtering along the outside of the convoy of cars following the offending farmer.
I had left myself a safe breaking distance between me and the vehicle that I was following. You can imagine my surprise when in the middle of a bend I was overtaken by a transit van, who upon finding nowhere to go simply made for the space between me and the car in front. As there was no space for him to move into it took some hard breaking, in the wet, not to become a participant in his awful driving show. Instead I got to stop in time, then move out to the centre line, keep his driver’s side mirror in sight and provide him with an in depth review of his driving style and road manners via a well-established hand gesture.
One of the best sub 100bhp bikes on the market
One of the arguments about wearing good quality PPE on a motorcycle is that it keeps the rider comfortable. It doesn’t offer any distractions and allows us to get on with what we’re doing. The fact that the outer shell had, in fact, kept me dry meant that there was no sodden base layer distracting me when van man attempted made his attempt on my life meaning that I dealt with the issue quickly and the way I was taught to. I didn’t even activate the Tenere’s ABS!
I got home and hour or so later and pulling the shell off I was impressed to find the Dual Pro jacket was completely dry. There was absolutely no water ingress.
Knox have been making kit for years. I’m not aware of any ‘clanger’ that they’ve ever put into their range, they’re credited with producing the first back protector and like the Tor and the Dual Pro they’ve created solutions to rider wear problems that we had no concept of solving. Not least of this is casual looking and feeling kit that offered double and triple A levels of protection.
The Dual Pro Outer Jacket
The only complaint that I would have about all the Tor and in particular the outer shell is that there isn’t a shell to cover my legs. My jeans were soaking when I got home!
All of the Knox range is available from www.planet-knox.com. The Tenere is available in all five model derivatives from www.danfay.ie