Well, I’m not talking about what you think I’m talking about, for all you gutter heads (I guess I’m one of them). But I was driving around in the desert rain tonight and started thinking about what riders where when they have to drive in the rain. Won’t the leathers shrink up? Seems awfully impractical to have a $440+ jacket be too small to wear after one unfortunate trip through some rain…
If you anticipate riding in rain, get some textile gear. I for one don’t, and I make positively sure that I won’t get caught in the rain before I leave the house.
Weather Underground and their hourly “probability of precipitation” is your friend.
That has been the traditional solution for wet leather. Your body will act as the form, and you wind up with leather that fits you better than ever before.
There are also waterproofing treatments you can buy for leather, and they come highly recommended. They need to be reapplied periodically, probably every six months to a year. They do work though.
Haven’t been caught in the rain yet, but obviously there’s no issues with heavy nylon shrinking in the rain. But there will be heat and lots of it. When the temperature is in the 30’s or 40’s, I zip in the rain liners and I stay warm.
Shrinkage depends on how wet it gets. I’ve ridden in light drizzle where my jackets gets throughly moist, but the water is basically sheeting off and not soaking through the leather — so their is no shrinkage. I suspect you would need to ride in a real downpour for an extended period before the water soaks deep enough for it to change the size.
I would love to have leather but here in Seattle it’s not really that practical. It was in the high 70’s with blue sky here last Sunday so I stripped all the rain and wind protection off my textile gear (high 70s is tropical for me). But Tuesday night I got caught out in a thunderstorm with temps in the mid 40’s. And of course muggins here had forgot to zip all the weather protection back on. Not a happy camper that night.
.
.