I’m not one to un-nessecarily upgrade the things I own. My N95 phone is nearly 4 years old, my 1960 Mini is just about to turn 50, my watch is a 28 year old US army issue original and as for my biking gear… well if it ain’t broke, why replace it?
About three years ago now I bought my first decent pair of bicycle gloves, the Serfas RX and for the past three years these gloves have gone everywhere with me.
Over 12,000 kms of wear and tear spanning two continents, I finally decided it was time to retire them this week. Here’s how they’ve held up.
Although I thought the palm area would get the most contact with the handlebars, by far the area most worn was the wrist section on both gloves. Despite being right handed, evidently I’m much more harder on my left hand when cycling. Here’s all that’s left of the wrist of my left RX glove;
As you can see the wrist area has taken a hammering and the bottom gel insert is just about to break through it’s stitching. Meanwhile the outside palm gel insert has broken through it’s stitching and has been poking through for three or four months. Despite this however it’s only come free and started flapping about over the past month or so.
Here’s a closeup of the completely disintegrated wrist area;
The right glove, despite being my dominant hand has fared slightly better but again the wrist area has completely come apart.
As you can see the gel inserts are all still intact and apart from the wrist area the right hand glove is actually in pretty decent nick.
Here’s a closeup of the right side wrist area… note there’s not much holding it together other then a few threads.
On the top side of the gloves there’s amazingly virtually no wear.
This is quite impressive considering the hours these gloves have put in. As you can see the only real wear is the red mesh color fade, which is to be expected given the massive amount of hours in the sun they’ve spent.
Above you can see the close to new color vs. the dull grey that now covers most of the top area.
Wrists and gel insert aside, the only other real area of wear has been the left glove area between the thumb and forefinger.
This area I remember started to show wear probably about a year ago but after reaching a certain point never got any worse. Had it of been the only wear spot of the gloves I’d still be wearing them for sure.
I’ve got no idea how long other gloves last other then the eBay cheapies I bought prior to these RX ones. The eBay ones lasted just under a month before the finger stitching started to fall apart.
In light of this I’ve been over the moon to get roughly 12,000 k’s and god knows how many hours out my RX gloves. Despite being more then happy to repurchase them again sadly I haven’t been able to track down a pair in Taiwan or find anyone willing to ship them here that didn’t cost stupid money in shipping.
That said If my next pair of gloves last half as long as my RX’s then I’ll be more then happy. Here’s to gear that works and doesn’t just fall apart like so much of the crappily made things being sold today.
Cheers Serfas.