Tourmaster Touring Jacket
Tourmaster Touring Jacket
EVALUATION
Black and white photography doesn’t do this jacket justice. In real life it’s a brilliant, flaming, dayglow yellow-green, the color used for fire trucks and life rafts and for the same reason: it can be seen from miles away and thus, one theory goes, the color makes the rider safer. (There’s some debate about this, but that comes later.)
There’s more to this jacket than color. Tourmaster is a relatively new company, specializing in motorcycle gear and run by people who ride and thus have a working knowledge of what we bikers need and like.
This jacket is billed as a touring jacket. It has a nylon shell, of a medium weight known in the trade as 200 denier, and a quilted inner shell of lighter nylon. Between these is a layer of 6.6-oz. Hollofil, a man-made insulation used in all the best sporting gear. The sleeves have reflective stripes, another safety feature. The outer shell is coated with a waterproof substance, but because the jacket has seams and they aren’t closed to water, the jacket is billed as water resistant rather than waterproof.
The touring designation is used because the jacket is long, to give some protection to the wearer’s butt and hips. There are two double front pockets, double in the sense that the inner half is a hand warmer and the outer half has a Velcro flap for sealing and security. The third pocket is on the upper right front, useful for glasses, bandanas, cigarettes, etc., and there’s a fourth pocket inside on the left, for wallets and the like. The jacket has a buckle-up belt so the waist won’t balloon at speed. Front closure is a metal zipper, fronted by a Velcro-backed storm flap. The sleeves secure with Velcro tabs. The inner collar is corduroy and fastens with yes, more Velcro.
Our jacket has been in daily service for eight months, through the summer, fall and winter riding seasons, which in our home climate means temperatures between 40° and 100°, chance of scattered showers.
The jacket works best as nippyweather wear. It isn’t uncomfortable on hot days with sleeves, collar and belt undone. And it won’t do the complete job on chilly mornings. But the rider doesn’t suffer in the heat and there’s enough in-
sulation to make winter lunchtime rides comfortable. We have been caught in showers and didn’t get wet, well, we didn’t get wet through the jacket, never mind about hands and feet, but we wouldn’t.care to depend on the jacket in a genuine thunderstorm. It does break the wind better than the quilted no-shell jackets, and it works over a wider temperature range than the usual unlined windbreaker.
Back to the color. There’s a school of thought in favor of being seen. There are riders who like knowing day-glow panels or suits of reflective stripes are there, shining like beacons on dark and stormy nights. Research indicates that being seen helps, in particular that drivers will recognize the human shape of a jacket, by inference here a bright jacket, and thus will not be as likely to violate the bike’s right of way. As a side note to that, the Tourmaster jacket doesn’t have a total motorcycle look; non-riders have asked if it’s a ski jacket.
On the other side, there are riders who like any color as long as it’s black or army drab. They argue that being seen makes for a better target, and they don’t want a riding jacket that could be anything other than a riding jacket.
The first group liked the Tourmaster jacket a lot. The second wouldn’t be seen wearing it.
Over to you. The Tourmaster touring jacket comes in men’s small, medium, large and extra large, $114.95, at dealerships and accessory stores everywhere.
