The jacket and trousers arrived on the front porch this morning, so I put them on and took our dog out for an after-breakfast walk to see how the garments work.
Conditions
- Both jacket and trousers are size Medium.
- I'm 5'5" tall and weigh 165 lbs with a 35" waist (i.e. got some love handles over my hips that need working on
)
- Walking surface: paved streets, no elevation change to mention, walked about half mile in both shade and sunshine.
- Starting Temp: ~43 degrees F
- Ending Temp: ~48 degrees F
- Wind: extremely light breeze, long-bladed grass & very tips of cedar fronds just barely moving
- Very hard bright sunshine, no clouds, no haze
- Overnight frost still on grass & foliage in places where the sun had not yet shone
- Day would pass for a "brisk fall day" in much of the USA
Fit & Feel
- Overall cut of jacket & trousers is loose & roomy.
- Coverage when wearing both garments is excellent with lots of overlap from below my butt to nearly diaphram level.
- High-count nylon ripstop material is smooth and silky feeling.
- You get the usual insulated nylon thermal-response from the material: a brief initial chilly feeling on contact followed by deepening warmth.
*** Jacket ***
- Jacket simply feels a bit large, which is expected in bivouac wear.
- The sleeves are long enough to be noticable.
*** Trousers ***
- The shell being nylon it created a static clingy feel on the lower legs of the pants as I walked outside. The jacket didn't make a noticable impression in this way. The clinginess seems to be a lot less now that I've worn them for an hour & am inside the house. However, when I move the fabric around on my legs, the clinginess returns.
- The trousers are built seriously long for my size. The one good thing being that the long pant legs (34" inseam, my inseam = 29-30") allow me to pull my feet inside the legs for bivy purposes. However, the overall blousiness (is that a word?) of the pant legs coupled with that long length means I wind up with a fair amount of the pant leg material crumpled & sagged down around my ankles. The material being extremely lightweight & not terribly bulky, it could be worse, but is still noticable.
- Trousers have a drop (waist to bottom of crotch measurement) of 16", which is huge on my frame. When the waist of the pants is at my waist, the bottom of the trouser crotch is swinging around half-way between my crotch and my knees, which restricts walking.
- The waist on the trousers feels a bit snug. This is especially true when I yard up the suspenders enough to raise the pant crotch to match my crotch and make walking easier, which places the pant waist nearly at my diaphram.
Adjustments, Controls, & Construction
- THROUGH-STITCHING OF INSULATION MATERIAL ONLY AT THE SEAMS! ! ! ! Hell yes I'm excited that they didn't put cosmetic stitching in the garments to make it "look like goose down". For those who wonder why this is a big deal, go read the info found at
http://www.wiggys.com about layering vs baffling. This lack of seams should make the garments shed wind very well.
- Overall a bit of a flimsy feel & look to the garments. Seems like lots of the seams are single-stitched where I would like to see them double-stitched for a bit of durability. I suspect some of my feeling about the "flimsy" part is due to the minimal-density materials they put into the garments to make them lightweight & compressible. Time will tell on the durability of these garments.
- There were a few threads looping about inside the pockets that needed to be trimmed.
- Relatively bright OD color, a couple shades toward kelly green from matte USGI OD. This will hopefully dull off a bit with wear & washings.
*** Jacket ***
- Quite long.
Natural location of hem is about 12" below my waist. It's long enough that when I sit down the contact points of my butt are covered (i.e. the bottom points of my pelvic bone).
- Sleeves are a bit long (a very good thing) for my relatively short arms (16" sleeve IIRC). I can very easily pull my hands inside the sleeves, then place one sleeve inside the other to make a double-thickness muff for my hands.
- Elastic wrists which are a bit large for my skinny wrists with not a lot of stretch in the elastic
and there is no adjustment mechanism.
I would have preferred gusseted velcro tabbed wrists. Yeah, that would have made the muff trick harder, but adjusting is more frequently needed.
- Angel-wing arms allow decent range of motion. Arms extended straight out yields acceptable riding up of bottom hem, a couple of inches. Arms raise over head rides the hem up almost up to my waist.
- Lightweight YKK toothed zipper up front of jacket. Decently large pull-tab on it with hole big enough to thread paracord through the hole.
- Front zipper on jacket is backwards for US men's clothing (i.e. slider is on left side track of zipper, like a US women's garment). May be that these were designed by a country where they make zippers that way (Britain maybe?).
- Nice stiff draft flap behind front jacket zipper to reduce wind intrusion through the zipper teeth.
Unfortunately, it covers from the bottom hem only to the base of my neck. This exposes the teeth of the zipper to chew at my neck & chin if I fold over the collar over. If I stand the collar up to block wind, the gap at the top of the draft flap allows wind intrusion near the arteries in your neck, allowing rapid loss of heat.
- Jacket collar could be taller IMHO. It is not tall enough to cover my ears and leaves much of the back of my head exposed. Maybe they assume you will buy their Bivvy Wear hood to go with the jacket, which I intend to do since I generally like the jacket & pants quite a bit.
- Thin-toothed nylon coil zippers close the outside angled hand-warmer pockets and large inside security pocket. Small pull-tabs on these could be a problem with very cold fingers.
- Inside security pocket dimensions: 7-3/4" deep, 7" zipper opening at the top. That puppy is BIG!!
- Outside handwarmer pockets: ~6" at rear (bottom of zipper track), 14" at front. I stuck a 12" combination square vertically at the front of the pocket (next to front zipper seam) and it fit with room for three of my skinny fingers above the end of the ruler part of the square = about 14".
- The overlapping flap on the outside angled pockets is attached to the bottom part of the zipper and faces up/rearward. Good points: It shingles off branches sliding along the fronts of the jacket & keeps them from snagging on the pocket or the flap itself. It also makes inserting your hand into the pocket easier since the flap serves to "scoop" your hand right into the pocket. Bad point: It also scoops any water rolling down from above (condensation off of trees, rain or drizzle, etc) right into the pocket as well.
- Left-hand pocket is set in jacket in such a way that the slider at bottom of the zipper track chewed at the outside of my wrist as I walked with hands in pockets. If I pulled the jacket sleeve down far enough over my wrist it did not do this. Right pocket gave no problems this way. Both pocket bottoms measure 6" up from hem. The left pocket's location seems to be set closer to the front zipper than the right pocket. It might also be coupled with a slightly different zipper angle as well. It's mildly annoying, but not life-threatening. In the woods I would be less inclined to walk with my hands in my pockets, to keep them handy for stumble recovery operations.
*** Trousers ***
- Fully elasticized waist closes with velcro tab. No manual adjust tabs.
- Given the snugness I find in the waist of the pants, I'd like to have seen a half-elastic waist with adjustment tabs. My guess is that they didn't do tabs because the traditional location for adjustment tabs is on the sides, where they would dig into you if you sleep on your side while bivying.
- Suspenders on trousers are made of lightweight 1-5/8" wide nylon webbing. Webbing does not have a lot of lateral stiffness. That's good for comfort in that the edge of the suspenders will be less inclined to cut into the side of your neck. That's bad because it allows the webbing to twist around itself in the slider buckle when you're tightening up the suspender straps. (Already happened once.)
- Suspenders have Fastex quick-release buckles at the front waist of pants for quickly dropping pants if the suspenders are under other layers of clothes like a jacket/parka. Very handy feature if you get diarrhea out in the woods. Back of suspenders are sewn into the waist.
- Crossing point of suspenders in back is sewn, not allowing any sliding or adjusting. I may rip out those seams & put in a 4-slot slider. It'll depend on long-term comfort or aggravation with it as it is now.
- Leg zips on outside of legs reach from my ankle to about mid-thigh. There is not draft flap behind the leg zips. Nonetheless, the zips did not chew at my legs during the short walk and were not noticibly leaking cold or wind.
- Zippers on the outside of the leg means that I cannot zip the legs together along the inseam to form a "half bag" for my legs, which is traditional treatment for bivy pants. That allows your legs to heat each other and makes more efficient use of the warm blood the body is sending into the legs.
- Like the jacket's wrists, the ankles on the pants are a bit large for me and are elasticized without any adjusting capability.
Bivy Functionality
- Overall I expect it will be quite good. In the crisp weather this morning it kept me plenty warm with very moderate movement, i.e. strolling not striding. I will test the garments in a bivy bag tonight (low- to mid-30's temps expected)
- Movement isn't necessarily needed to warm this material up. When I stood still in the sunshine, I could
REALLY feel the radiant heat from the sunshine accumulating quickly in the garments.
) failure, the Bivvy Wear is still proving to be a very effective, low-cost, wind-stopping warmth layer. My initial concerns about the durability of the fabric and the construction methods/materials continue to be without foundation in my day-to-day wear of the jacket. I'm tempted to get a spare jacket from Brigade Quartermaster to have when this one eventually wears out, even though I'm still unemployed. I like the jacket THAT MUCH for its comfort and warmth.
