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RELTEX Guide to Buying Leathers



Leather Care

To clean this product wipe the leather with a damp cloth. Do not use detergent soap or solvents. To remove dirt clean lightly with a soft brush or cloth and use cool clean water. Dry away from direct heat and sunlight in a well ventilated space. Use only proprietary after market leather treatments.

Fit for Purpose

If you're going to ride a bike, whatever the size, you have to wear some protective gear. Protection comes in many forms, obviously skin and tarmac don't mix but on top of that you need rain and wind proofing (even for wrong types of rain) together with breath-ability. You may need something to fit comfortably over your work clothes, particularly a suit or something you can wear anywhere without people instinctively thrusting packages at you with dispatch notes! Unless of course that is how you earn your bread and butter - we've got that covered too...

Armour

All our motorcycle leathers come with removable padding. Standard leathers have basic foam padding and premium cowhide upgraded leathers have CE approved hard plastic shell slotted armor on elbow and shoulders and a high density memory foam pad for the back (for jackets), also hard plastic shell knee protection, knee sliders and memory foam hip pads (for trousers). You cannot order standard leather with CE approved armor. You can only purchase CE approved padding when you choose to upgrade to premium cowhide as well.

Skin Types

We supply two main types of leather material jacket and trouser skins. Standard milled Cowhide leather (underside layer cow skin) and treated premium Cowhide Leather (top layer cow skin). Standard Cowhide is the more popular choice due to price, and is 1.3mm drum dyed (also we have a limited design range of Buffalo hide leathers which is the cheapest option due to unrefined grain), however the treated premium cowhide leather type is a top grade leather hence smoother, heavier and a finer grained leather. Premium cowhide is also aniline dye treated. Aniline leather is pigmented to add consistent colour and reduce natural imperfections. The process also helps the leather resist fading and soiling. Even though it doesn’t look as tough as milled leather (standard cowhide), which is slightly pebbly or grainy in appearance, aniline is a higher quality and will wear better than milled leather which tends to be stiff and uncomfortable. No surprises that we strongly recommend that bikers who need freedom of movement as well as protection on the open road, outfit themselves in motorcycle jackets cut from aniline leather hence go with the upgrade. Also colours also do not run when soaked with rain.

There is no difference to the naked eye between standard and premium cowhide in terms of looks, only once you wear the jacket or trouser you can feel the weight, shape and texture difference. The premium version does come with an additional £25 per item charge, (£35 for suits) but is the recommended choice of wear by us if your looking for the best quality. Another bonus of upgrading to premium cowhide is that it's supplied with CE approved hard plastic armor padding. Standard cowhide comes with non CE foam padding.

Other Features

All our leather jackets and trousers come with the industry standard rear 8" & full 3/4" zips for attachment for compatible trousers / jackets, and all have reinforced double nylon stitching to meet the ISO norm and all are padded in the right places. All armour areas are slotted velcro pockets so supplied padding or hard shell armour is removable.

Price

Highly competitive, in fact for the same quality and service we will not be beaten. By having our own factory setup and keeping overheads low with a online only structure, we can seriously undercut our competitor prices. Also you must watch out for bad quality inferior knock offs floating around eBay and stick to established merchants like us for the best before and after sales customer service. Please note that all items and related pictures from our website and eBay store are exclusively copyrighted to RELTEX and any seen elsewhere are poor copies of our products (although our images are being widely used without permission) and must not be purchased from anywhere other that from our direct sales website or our related eBay clearance store 'outlet-leathers'.

The Inside Track

At RELTEX we mostly use the treated thicker premium cowhide replica jacket and trousers worn as a two piece suit with protective inserts, which covers most weathers and most journeys in the UK. Any biker that's been around the block a while will tell you that even at 5 mph an 'incident' can hurt so we're conditioned to wearing decent gear even for short journeys