Originally Posted by
pdlamb
No experience, so feel free to disregard my speculations. Trying to reason it out, though:
(1) My Pearl AmFibs are too warm for me over 25F -- they'll get saturated in sweat (and lose insulating properties shortly thereafter).
(2) I can adjust my jacket sleeve cuffs to cover the tops of gloves, so rain won't run down into the glove.
(3) Neoprene gloves, again IME, aren't sufficiently warm below 40F, but are waterproof.
So, putting these together, I'd suggest a layered system. Choose gloves that work around 45F. Get neoprene gloves about two sizes too big to go over the inner layer glove. Then take an extra pair of the inner gloves, so you can switch them out after 2-3 hours. Make sure your jacket sleeves go OVER the tops of the neoprene gloves.
Looking around at gloves and thinking about the problem some more . . .
It seems to me that hoping for dry insulation isn't the right thing. In randonneuring, hoping seldom works. One assumes that everything goes wrong and takes it from there. So then, wet insulation - how can it be improved on? It seems to me that what really went wrong for us was that the water penetrated our gloves too easily. Thus we were always warming new cold water. The downside of most rubber outer glove options is that our jacket and hopefully jersey sleeves must go over the glove. Since we are road riders and cruise at almost 20 mph, we wear tight fitting clothes. No way will a gauntlet or large cuff fit up inside our clothing. We won't have bare hands when doing this arranging, so it has to be easy. I might be able to find a pair of rubber work gloves with a stretch cuff, but the problem with those is that they lack a nose-wipe and cycling padding. 12 hours on a bike is a long time.
This line of thought leads me to Gore-Tex outers. At least they are waterproof and somewhat breathable. The idea being that water ingress will be much slower. If we get them large enough, we can wear poly liners in them for additional wet insulation. Since we are randonneuring, we won't be stopping for clothing adjustments very often, hopefully only every 40 miles or so. Thus we won't be changing our clothes or gloves, and need to have stuff that can just stay on. We bring a dry pair of gloves, but they are lighter gloves for dry or showery conditions. We may be on the bike in foul conditions for 12 hours, so we need stuff that we can wear steady-state.
I looked more closely at my OP glove possibilities and found them all flawed. Many of them had Primaloft insulation which would vanish when wet. Some had cuffs that were too large. Some weren't sufficiently waterproof. Some were unknown quantities with no reviews or tech information.
The only thing I've been able to find so far that satisfies all my criteria are XENON GORE-TEX® Gloves:
http://www.goreapparel.com/gore-bike...eartype-gloves