Back in mid-September, Mechanix Wear, which makes the Mechanix brand work gloves, was having a 30% off site-wide sale, with even better deals on certain products, so I picked up a couple pairs of gloves including the Leather M-Pact® Insulated Driver F9-360 Gloves which were being offered for 60% off, or basically $30 for the pair. (Going back to their website as I write this, I see that they are still being offered for this price and they are having a 25% site-wide sale on most other products).
The gloves are, as indicated, leather with rubber "armor" over the knuckles and back of the fingers to protect against you hand getting hurt should it get struck, or your hand strike something. If you have worked on cars or plumbing, you know how easy it is to "bark" your knuckles if a wrench slips or something suddenly gives.
The leather seems reasonably thick so they should function well as work gloves. They are insulated with 100g PrimaLoft® Gold performance insulation according to the website. I could not find any information as to a temperature rating, however. Nevertheless, there was still a reasonable amount of manual dexterity with the fingers. I don't think that you could do fine work with the on, but for using tools, picking up wood, doing yard work, changing a tire, and so on, they should work fine.
The flexibility is important to me because I have a pair of heavy insulated gloves that are great at keeping my hands toasty warm in even 0 degree F (-17.7 C) weather, but the insulation is so thick that it makes it hard to use them for yard work and even makes my hands hurt after a while. I bought these specifically to address that issue.
There is also a woven cuff inside the opening to the glove to keep wind or snow from getting into the gloves. You can see this cuff poking out a bit on the glove on the left side in the photograph above.
Even though I received the gloves in September, I didn't really have a need to use them until a couple weekends ago. The temperatures had dropped well into the 20s and I think it was still below freezing when I started to work filling my utility trailer with scrap wood to take to the local landfill. I initially had gone out with a lighter pair of work gloves, but decided it was too cold and decided it was a good opportunity to try the gloves. (And also a good time to get a couple photos before the gloves got dirty).
The worked great: they were comfortable, kept my hands warm and I had no issues with loading the wood scraps and picking up pieces from the ground. I also used them with hooking up the trailer (other than plugging in the wiring for the brake lights and turn signals).
No comments:
Post a Comment