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I got caught out with the weather on my New Zealand South Island tour so grabbed whatever I could find in the way of warmer gloves to allow that ride to continue and as it turns out got myself a reasonable pair of winter gloves.
The Dainese Plaza 3 gloves are simple construction being all fabric and do not have any hard knuckle protection. They do not state how abrasion resistant the materials are and I would guess these gloves do not offer anything near the sort of protection my Rough and Road Primasoft winter gloves do. However they are much more flexible and not as bulky thus are more comfortable to use.
They are waterproof. I cannot vouch them being all day waterproof as I only had a few hours rain however in my previous experience with fabric style winter gloves they perform far better in rain than leather waterproof gloves. The leather will get waterlogged and then the Gore-tex liner fails. (same as how Gore-Tex jackets and pants can fail when the outer layer becomes waterlogged) Even applying wax to the leather only delays this for a little while. These gloves and my TourMaster Cold-Tex 3 winter gloves seem to not rely on a “durable water resist coating” like jackets do (which lasts no more than a few outings in rain) but rather are either constructed from a material that is waterproof or they have a bonded waterproof liner – something that is now starting to appear in top of the range jackets and is said to not suffer from the waterlogging problem.
The cuffs of these gloves have an elastic inner and the outer cuff is not flared like most gloves so is quite slim. This worked much better than I imagined when initially looking at them. The elastic inner gives a snug fit of the warm liner then the less bulky outer cuff allowed me to close my jacket cuffs down more than I normally would be able to do over thick winter gloves and that gave a good seal with no air sneaking up my jacket arm and no pressure on the jacket cuffs velcro to come undone while riding as happens with bulky gloves.
One problem I find with fabric gloves is they lack friction on the palm when holding the throttle open. This type of glove usually has some suede patches on palm to assist with gripping the hand controls but suede is not as well suited as leather for this task. The Dainese Plaza 3 gloves have suede and my throttle hand was getting fatigue from having to squeeze firmer than normal to keep the throttle open against the return spring. Newer bikes with ride by wire generally have softer return springs (FJR1300 being an exception) so this may not be such an issue for you but riding the Bandit 1250 I actually had to pull over and take regular ‘throttle breaks’.
Apart from that I quite like these gloves. They pack down small and on future trips where there is cold weather (hopefully not often) I will bring them with me.
