David brought up the subject of gloves in a chat with me the other day, wondering what gloves were appropriate in areas
with actual climate instead of weather. He lives in an area that
doesn't see much change from summer to winter, whereas a few of us
live in the northern states and have to deal with things like snow
and below zero temperatures. Since I work outside a lot, doing pretty
much the same things year-round, I thought I'd give my two cent's
worth.
Gloves are designed to protect your
hands. I like the German word for gloves, Handschuh, literally a shoe
for your hands. That gives you a good idea of the utility of gloves
as well as an idea of how varied they can be. From spike heels to
steel-toed boots, gloves and shoes both come in an amazing variety of
forms. I wear different gloves for different hazards, but the
question was about cold weather so I'll emphasize that as a criteria
for selection.
Chemical Gloves
I work with industrial quantities of
agricultural chemicals. Some of them are corrosive, others are
flammable, and they're all poisonous. Normal weather lets me get by
with vinyl or rubber gloves for most of them, but I keep
cheapcotton gloves around to wear as a liner inside them when the
temperatures drop. I specify
cheap cotton gloves, because they
are disposable if they become contaminated and some of the chemicals I
work with are too nasty to risk washing gloves. Working with
cryogenic materials like anhydrous ammonia and LP gas, which will
freeze skin on contact, requires special gloves but I still wear
liners under them in the winter.
Work Gloves
Normally I'll have on a pair of leather
gloves. Work provides us with cow or pigskin leather gloves,
whichever is in stock at the time, and they keep me from picking up a
lot of minor nicks and scrapes. Once October rolls around, we break
out the insulated leather gloves. The brand we stock is insulated
with Thinsulate*, which does a good job of keeping fingers warm without
too much bulk. These work until the temperature drops below 20°F, which is when I break out the real winter gloves. I prefer a
heavier leather shell and thicker liner, windproof and waterproof if
I can get it. I avoid plastic gloves because they melt or burn more
easily than leather and in the winter they get brittle and crack.
*Thinsulate is a branded polymer
insulation rated by “grams”, with the higher numbers providing
more insulating value. Light weather will call for 40-60 gram lining,
from freezing to about zero you'll want 100 grams, and below that I
tend to rely on layers and it gets hard to quantify.
Extreme Conditions
Once in a while I get called to do
really stupid things, like dragging idiots out of ditches in the
middle of the night during a snow storm. This requires handling
chains that are cold enough to stick to bare skin and usually a lot
of time next to or underneath a vehicle in the snow. This requires a
heavy glove with a thick layer of insulation, but I've made do with
plain leather and frequent breaks to warm up my fingers.
It's been a few years since we've had
ice on the lakes thick enough to allow ice fishing, but that's
another extreme. We don't do it often enough to justify building the
ice fishing cabins you'll find further north, so we just bundle up
and stand on the ice for a few hours at a time. If you ever need to
get away from people, ice fishing is a good choice.; there aren't many idiots dedicated enough to follow you out onto a frozen lake just to
annoy you.
Both of these situations call for a
heavily insulated glove that is waterproof. I have a couple to choose
from, depending on how bad it really is. The first is a heavy leather
glove with Thinsulate liner and a layer of Mylar between them. Any
pair of quality ski gloves will do as well, and will be easier to
find. They're great for keeping the fingers warm, but they limit the mobility
of the fingers.
My other option is a pair of
arcticmittens that I got from a Army surplus store years ago. Made of soft deer
leather with a piece of fur on the back of the hand for wiping
your nose on, they come with thick wool liners to provide insulation.
They also come with a cord that is long enough to run up your
sleeve, over your shoulder and down the other sleeve. You then attach
the mittens to the cord so you can't lose them if you have to remove
one for some reason. It may sound like something you'd do for
children, but in extreme weather losing your gloves can mean losing
your hands to frostbite. The
newerversion comes with a quilted liner and camouflage fabric cuff, but
should work the same. Mittens keep your fingers in the same space to
preserve heat, but that also limits all of your finger motion. For
truly Arctic conditions, I'd look for a set of mittens made of animal
skin with the fur on the inside.
Mobility
I've mentioned finger mobility several
times for a reason. If you're not used to wearing gloves, it'll
take some adjustments in your routines to get used to the loss of
fine finger control. All of our valves and cranks at work are
over-sized to provide a bit more leverage, and this also comes in
handy when you're trying to work them wearing heavy gloves. If you've
ever seen a piece of industrial equipment and wondered why the
buttons and controls are so large, it's to allow their use while
wearing gloves.
With a bit of practice, you'll be able to do most
manual labor without noticing the gloves, but finer work that requires
dexterity will call for either removing your gloves or finding/making
a compromise. If you look around the hunting supply stores, you'll
find “shooting” gloves and mittens which have an extra
finger or a hole that you can poke your trigger finger out of when
you need to fire a weapon. Another option is the old standby of
“fingerless”gloves that are missing the tips of the fingers to allow finer
motion while still keeping most of your hand warm. There are also a
lot of hybrid gloves that blend gloves and mittens, like
these
or
these.
I'm also seeing a lot of new gloves
with conductive rubber tips on the fingers for use with touch-screen
technology. Trying to use a cell phone or tablet while wearing gloves
is not something I've ever done; I use a bluetooth headset under my
hat for the phone in cold weather, but the younger employees will
chance frostbite in order to play with their phones. I have rubber tips on my pens for if I have to text or punch in data while
wearing gloves, so I've not yet bought a pair of the new style
gloves.
Practice
If you carry a weapon as part of your
EDC and you live where it gets cold enough to need gloves, you need
to practice with your weapon while wearing gloves. Drawing a weapon from a holster or
pocket is difficult when you can't feel it; the bulk of a pair of
gloves will change your grip, and thus your sight picture; loading a
magazine gets to be comical and revolvers are even worse; and if you're
wearing insulated gloves you may not be able to get your finger
inside the trigger guard. You may never have noticed it, but military pattern AR-style rifles have a
trap-door style bottom plate on the trigger guard, and pressing in the detent with the tip of a bullet or
other pointy object will let the plate swing down and out of the way,
opening up the trigger guard so you can get a gloved finger in there.
If all else fails, learn how to get the glove off of your shooting
hand in a hurry.
Gloves are an important part of my
daily gear, so I keep several options around. If you're an office
worker, you'll probably need gloves more than I do in order to avoid the nicks and cuts that my callouses would prevent. I'm not going to
knock anybody's lifestyle, but a soft manicured hand is not going be
able to take the damage as well as a calloused one.
