This entry was posted on Thursday, March 5th, 2009 at 9:10 am and is filed under Chaps, Jackets, Leather Discussion, Motorcycle Safety. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
That would be ’Unidentified Flying Road Debris’
But seriously, if you’ve been riding more than an hour, I’m sure you are familiar with the pebbles and road debris that can be kicked up by passing vehicles and vehicles you may be following from time to time. Wearing a leather motorcycle jacket and leather chaps protects a riders skin from these usually small, but potentially injurous missiles. The toughness of the leather and padding will help to deflect and absorb the impacts of these objects.
And let’s not forget about ‘bugs’. Impacting a large, hard-shelled bug at highway speed and be quite painful on bare skin or thin clothing. And that’s if it is just an ordinary bug, you also run the risk of impacting a bee or wasp, which puts you into a whole new category of pain (I can tell you from experience). Depending on the location of the impact, this can pose a serious safety and/or control risk to the rider operating the motorcycle. The thick, resilient protection afforded by leather can easily absorb these impacts unscathed, sparing you the pain and risk. For obvious reasons, we also recommend wearing a helmet, with a face-shield, and gloves.
