By Rick Shandley
Kombi Knuckle Over leather gloves worked great in bitter, sometimes, wind-driven cold these past few months. You’ve got one color option, and that would black on black. We couldn’t ask for more in a five-finger all purpose insulated glove.
Soft, supple, and rugged leather outer glove shell construction is your first clue as to the quality and utility of these Kombi Knuckle-over gloves. Not to be confused with the sister Kombi knuckle-over leather mitts, these Kombi five-finger gloves offered as much insulation, warmth, and weather protection we could hope for without going to the mitten style.
There are advantages and disadvantages between the mitten style and the five-finger style of Kombi knuckle-over leather gloves that primarily have to do with the severity of the cold. Mitten style insulated gloves keep your fingers together and allow your digits to keep one another warm in severe cold, but you lack dexterity. The five-finger style allows you to use your hands and fingers, but since each finger is individually insulated, you don’t have the ability for the fingers to radiate heat amongst each other.
The five-finger Kombi Knuckle Over leather gloves we tested were used in some pretty cold weather in the Sierra Nevada and San
Jacinto mountains this winter. While wearing them during active treks on snow-bound journey’s with a backpack, daypack, on snow shoes or crampons, these gloves are warm even when the temperature went down into single digits. It was when activity stopped and everything chills down, we did experience the lower limits of this glove.
When you are not active, after the tent has been erected, the food and hot liquids were consumed, cold hands are just that, cold: until you get moving and the blood going. By contrast, donning into these Kombi Knuckle Over’s (KO) in the earliest hours of the pre-dawn morning – with the boots on and having recently slipped out of a nice Kelty Foraker -15° down sleeping bag — your body is warm, your fingers fully operable, these Kombi KO’s insulate immediately.
Now the “Knuckle Over” deal simply means you have a flexible leather pleat at the top of your hand so your bony knuckles give your hand full dexterity from fist to flat. You also have flex-joints that facilitate the lower two knuckles of each hand for enhanced dexterity.
No, you don’t have the all-around dexterity you’d expect from leather driving gloves. There are several layers of insulation in addition to the leather shell. Weatherproofing is the responsibility of liners of Gore-Tex and Accu-Dri. For warmth Kombi looked to X-loft, a synthetic insulation. The synthetic fleece lining next to your skin is soft and comfortable. With all your fingers in the right cocoon, these Kombi’s are nice to wear. A bonus is the quality of the black leather. Like we said, it’s soft and supple visually as well so they look almost like cold weather dress gloves.
Stitching quality is accurate and tight throughout these gloves. The palms of these gloves are of rough-out black leather on top of the soft glove leather. Sturdy wrist straps and cuff closure cords allow you to really secure these gloves and get into them or out of them all day long.
And because these gloves use several layers of specific liner materials, you have to take care when removing these gloves from your fingers. The reason is that each liner is its own barrier, working in harmony with the other unique layers to keep weather out and warmth insulation in. Therefore none of these layers are sewn together.
If you just yank them off, well, it’s your fault and you should not be allowed to wear them ever again. That’s a good way to kill good
gloves. Many modern insulated gloves are built like this. You have to be conscious of taking them off carefully so they’ll fit like a glove when you put them on. It’s not a big deal to get used to.
The Kombi leather is top-notch and something you instantly appreciate about these high-quality gloves. For price, you’re looking at less than $100.00. For quality, you should expect to pay more than $100.00 in this writers view. You do get a rough-and-tumble cold weather working glove that you can do most hand functions with them. There great when you’re using hand tools like a snow shovel, ice-ax, or a flashlight.
Overall we appreciate this style and build of cold weather glove. It’s suited for many cold weather activities winter board sports to just plain being out in the cold. They have limitations at the single digit temps where you are not active. This non-active state must include the reality of the entire body cooling down and in need of outside warmth like down insulation or a camp fire. When you are on the move, they keep your hands warm and insulated. The jury is out on the quality or durability of the hardware for the wrist strap and cuff cinches. But we view these gloves as high-quality in general.
Below are four primary ways you can lose heat from your body. These are four areas each of the unique, stand-alone, liners such as Gore-Tex, are designed to protect and insulate you from the harshness of cold environments:
- EVAPORATION: Heat loss from the cooling effects of moisture on the skin. Kombi’s wicking linings address this by moving the perspiration on your hands away from the skin to the outer shell of the glove or mitten.
- CONDUCTION: Heat loss caused by direct heat transfer from something warm to something cold (placing a bare hand on a cold window for example). Kombi’s full wrap construction using the various components of shell, insulation and lining insulate against this type of heat loss.
- CONVECTION: Heat loss as a result of natural body heat escaping into the air. The Kombi multi-layered construction minimizes body heat loss by trapping air in the various components of each style.
- RADIATION: Heat loss due to the transfer of heat from a warm environment to a cold one. Here again the Kombi multi-layered system, and in particular our use of waterproof/breathable inserts, works to minimize heat loss due to radiation.