The weekend’s ride up to Suffolk revealed a not so startling fact: I need a riding jacket to replace the flawed Falstaff I recently sold. My cut-down Rukka one-piece PVC from the late 70s certainly kept the rain off, but with the Aerostich Kanestu electric liner pumped up underneath, it’s quite a Houdinian struggle to get in and out of it, as you can see on the right. Once on, the rubber Rukka anorak felt OK and of course laughed off the downpour back down the M11, but being a pull-over and with no external pockets apart from a flat patch one I’ve glued on, it’s not so practical.

Back home, a lost afternoon on Google unearthed the hitherto unheard of Armr Moto brand. Their adventure style Kiso jacket looked pretty good to me: elegant design and muted colour options, not too much gimmickry you often find on cheapies to disguise the cheapness, a mystery membrane bonded to the jacket shell, not in a separate liner – and at £100 cheap enough to take a punt if the whole thing spontaneously dissolves after a few months.

Dainese & Rukka Gore-Tex
As a back up, I was also eyeing up the similarly spec’d and as-slick looking Dainese Tundra (left), not least because Dainese Gore-Tex is 30% off this month. But after discount that’s still nearly 400 quid including the somewhat naff ally shoulder pads. Then I clocked that mad4bikes were doing the £100 Armr Kiso jacket with free pair of Armr Hara trousers worth £50, plus a balaclava and free post too. For better or worse, decision made.

A couple days later after I’d bought the Armr outfit (more below) I was passing my local Dainese dealer and popped in to see what I’d missed out on. Not so much it seems. The Tundra looked a bit short to me, only three exterior pockets (all small), a plusher quilted lining and I suppose you can convince yourself that at over 5 times the rrp of the Kiso, it must be better made and uses Gore-Tex which must come with an instant price hike (but quite probably performance too). Down the rack, Infinity were discounting some Rukkas, including a couple I’d eyed up a few months ago, a Kalahari and a Granite. Still well over five hundred quid, you do have to ask where does the extra money goes once you’ve paid for the names. I guess it all depends on how much you ride and how much you’re prepared to invest in being sure your garments perform – plus of course your appearance prefs. As I discuss here in the Falstaff review (‘My thoughts on Goretex’, halfway down), membranes will eventually fail unless you’re able to take good care of them with special soaps and other treatments, which is not so practical for overlanding. In the end the only thing that can be reliably guaranteed to keep out rain is an impermeable fabric like my 40-year-old PVC Rukkamac or a poncho which fellow overmotard Austin Vince may still swear by. It’s been the sam with all sorts of name-brand Gore_tex hiking gear I used or owned – if it lives up to the hype it’s a bonus, but it rarely has for me so I now evaluate such garments with this membrane-cynicism in mind.

Armr out of the box
I have to admit that for what I paid I was fearing some proto Lidl-esque piece of crap, but with a ‘no-questions’ returns policy I had little to lose. On first impressions I do believe I may well have got a bit more than I paid for. Heck, you even get branded Armr coast hangers for the jacket and pants, and the quality of the finish and detailing is not at all shabby.

The jacket weighs just under 2 kilos in a not too stiff 600D fabric weight which suits me. It has a zip-in quilted liner which is on the legal limit of useful thickness while still permitting the use of the word ‘quilted’. It’s perhaps more handy as a smooth surface to slip in and out of the jacket, plus a way of keeping the membraned inside of the jacket behind the mesh clean. The liner has a mobile pocket and a zipped pocket inside. Without the 270g liner the jacket weighs 1.68kg (3.7lbs).

You get a lot of tags hanging off your modern motorcycle apparel these days, highlighting the many technical features which adorn your new and still-pungent garment. Bedangled with half a dozen tags, the Armr outfit is no exception. Perhaps it’s an EU safety directive, but if you bother looking, at least three of them proclaim nothing more than: ‘Waterproof!’ – ‘Reflective!’ and best of all ‘Detachable Linning! [sic]‘. There’s no mention of what the magical membrane actually is – not even Hipora™, a poor-man’s Gore-Tex. Whatever it is, let’s hope it works.

Putting on the XL size, it has to be said it’s quite a snug fit on me, but having tried it with my typical riding gear – a fleece or the Kanestu over a shirt – and flapping around like a beached salmon, I’ll stick with it and for once enjoy not looking like Santa’s sack. Plus the marginal liner could be removed for a tad extra volume. I can report the arms are good and long, but on me the body of the jacket could do with another inch or two’s length, although maybe that’s just because my recent Aero jackets were like that. Longer would make room for bigger pockets, too (see below). A quick ride up town a coupe of days after getting it and looking at the pictures of me in it have conformed this; the belt is too high on me – at the bottom of my rib cage rather than the top of my hips. A the jacket indeed looks a little short to look at though as with the belt it’s unnoticed on the road.

Kiso features
Starting with the pockets, you get 9 all up: two at the bottom with velcro and storm flap and what feels like a reassuringly waterproof lining – nice if it works. Behind them are nifty hand-warming pockets too, also handy. There are two more vertical zipped ones on the chest with easy-grab zip tags and also with the plasticy liners which bodes well, but the pockets can barely take the size of my hand which is a big shame. Inside left you get a slightly larger zipped pocket in the jacket body, and there’s a map pocket on the back outside (see below). This seems to be the ‘adv look’ these days but with the fresh velcro binding like gorilla tape, it’s hard work to get to with the jacket on. I want a pocket like that on the front! I’m sure going to miss the massive- and massive array of pockets of my old Aero Darien-patterned jackets so may sew something to suit inside the Kiso.

If you ask me, once you get hot wearing your moto jacket the simplest way of cooling of is surely unzipping the main zip a bit or pulling over for a piña colada. With the sort of riding I do I’m not convinced about the real-world efficacy of zipped vents on motorcycle jackets once you factor in the possibility of them letting rain in past the zips. But the Kiso comes with a zipped pair on the front shoulders (rather than in the more usual armpits) which barely open up – and corresponding vertical exhaust vents below the shoulder blades on the back which may work well, but which I can’t get to with the jacket zipped up. (as it happens the £550 Dainese Tundra had what appeared to be even less efficacious front vents – you do wonder why they bother). Perhaps on the road they may make a difference and eliminate the flapping of an unzipped jacket, but when pushing a bike through desert sand with minimal breeze, vents make little difference in my experience. I may retract this criticism unconditionally once I’ve ridden with the jacket in vent mode on a hot day.

With a name like Armr and a slogan ‘Battle Ready’ you’d expect some good protection. The Kiso delivers with discrete shoulder and elbow pads which are CE certified but I suspect are made of distinctly ordinary, ‘non-molecular’ padding while being slim and unobtrusive. The ones which came with my Darien and Falstaff may well have worked better in a crash, but were far too bulky so I never used them, but what I have here I’ll leave in. I admit I’m a bit ‘old school’ about moto padding, like I am about vents. I believe in a typical crash a jacket’s resistance to abrasion counts for far more than whether your elbows or shoulders get a whack. There’s further provision in the jacket’s inside back meshing to slip in a CE spine protector plus there’s an in-built padded panel outside, at the top of the back (above right), as well as extra layers of heavy, 1680D fabric on the shoulders and elbows. I suppose there’s nothing to stop you fitting cleverer ‘impact-lock’ D30 padding on the shoulders, and along with a bit of discrete reflective detailing, all in all for what you pay, the Armr’s armour and protection package lives up to the name.

As for adjustability, you get a neat, reversed Darien-style velcro waist band to haul in the belly, chunky velcro tabs on the wrists, velcro bands to pull around the biceps plus a cinching popper on the forearms which will do the job in snugging the Kanetsu’s electric elements close to my arms for maximum heat benefit. The main zip is a one-way affair but comes with a chunky storm flap before the main velcro flap closes over it. It leads up to become the integral collar closure where I have to say the neoprene-lined collar is a tad on the short side, but I usually ride with a neck tube so I dare say I’ll get over it.

The Hara trousers got sent back quick for a bigger size (RTF size chart…) but now I have the 4XL (40-42″ – about 2-3″ mor than my actual waist) and I can tell you they come with a fitted quilting which may get too warm. There are also knee pads and a pair of small velcro+zip pockets and a velcro belt with a zip and bellows waist opening rather than a regular fly zip which is  less leak prone than a zip in this key dip area but still enables you to take a leak without a major cabinet reshuffle. There’s a slip proof or wear resisting panel in the butt-seat interface zone (left).

The Haras also feature a back stretch panel and can be zipped to the back of the Kiso jacket – a neat, draught excluding feature I look forward to trying one cold day. At the other end you get a bellows and zip with velcro closure to enable you to get them on over boots and snug them up. So, trousers pleasingly unrestrictive with no leak-prone full length side zips as my recently pinched Darien pants had. We’ll see how rain proof the fabric proves to be.

So they we have it. After parading around the flat and executing various lightening-fast mirror-checks which would make Bruce Willis wet himself, I conclude that on looks and features alone, at £99.98 the mad4bikes package is an unnervingly great deal (I’ll give the balaclava away). The small jacket pockets aren’t a flaw unique to Armr Moto and above all, if the outfit withstands a few hours’ rain and continues to do so for a few months, I’ll end up feeling quite pleased with myself. Does performance match appearance; as with so much gear these days, that is the 64,000￥ question.

More news about all that when the weather turns nasty.