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After my bad luck with the Dryrider Stealth gloves I bought whilst on my Kaputa tour I ordered what I hoped would be much better quality summer gloves.
I searched to try find any stock of the Rough and Road Coolmax lined summer gloves I previously owned but were lost in shipping. Rough and Road are not making them at the moment so I then went looking for Coolmax lined gloves and these are rare. I was impressed with the quality of my Merlin Mahala Pro jacket so browsed their catalogue and found their Shenstone gloves.
The Shenstone gloves are lined to wick away moisture and to insulate skin from leather which makes gloves more comfortable than having leather against your skin. It also helps stop your skin from getting a rash from the residual tanning acid or dye in leather.
I try not to wear non lined gloves now. I used to get dermatitis in the past and had to apply barrier cream to my hands a couple times a day on tour to protect from leather which is a common trigger of the ailment. These are ok. Not not as nice a liner as the Coolmax Rough and Road gloves.
With these gloves the finger stitching is on the outside not inside. Look at the fingers below to understand what I mean. This goes quite some way to making them more comfortable than gloves with poorly done stitching on the inside.
The phone touch screen pads have their stitching inside. I wish the gloves did not have this, I find these touch screen pads to be useless anyway and need to remove a glove to operate the small buttons or menus on a phone but I guess people expect this in gloves.
The thumbs have a stitch line across them in addition to the touch screen pad that I think could have been done a different way. However they are quite comfortable. Not as good as the Rough and Road due to the liner but the D30 protection is better than the Rough and Road goves.
With the gloves not having a separate raised section for the armor like my Rough and Road Goretex gloves the softer D30 armor assists making the gloves more flexible and perhaps most importantly it will do something in an impact. Carbon fibre knuckle protectors in a fall will pass on 100% of the impact force to your knuckles just like a very hard shell helmet will transfer all the G force to your brain – hard is not better.
Ventilation is excellent, one look will tell you that I suppose however in case you are wondering the liner regulates but does not obstruct airflow into the gloves. The construction seems decent and the materials used appear to be of a good quality. Pretty good gloves considering their reasonable price.
I will update my experience as I put further miles on them in the USA.
Ok well I have not published this before I returned from USA. The gloves continue to be comfortable. I really cannot find much to complain about now I have done two tours with them. At the same price as junk from Dryrider these are vastly better and much better than the dogshit summer gloves I have had from Alpinestars and Dainese.
Update 1. They have started to fray a little on the back of the fingers. I will keep an eye on this and if it gets worse then will update this with photos. Additionally I think the inner liner is not anywhere near as good as the inner liner in my Rough and Road gloves. So yes not a bad pair of gloves so far but I may end up importing a pair from Japan in future.
Update 2. Well they are no longer as comfortable as when new. Oddly the inner liner seems to have lost it’s plushness and my hands got chaffing wearing them on my last two rides so I will be retiring these gloves early and looking for a replacement.
