Joe Rocket Alter Ego 3.0 Review
 

Greetings All

I'm 3 months into my South America trip and so far I'm reasonably happy with this jacket. It's not perfect but if you are looking for a new jacket for your next trip have a look at it as one of your options

The Old Model

Back in 2007-8 I asked about whether the Alter Ego 2.0 was a good overland jacket and wrote about its good and bad points after the trip

http://www.horizonsunlimited.com/hub...-ego-2-a-27089

As an overland jacket it was ok and the mesh part of the jacket worked well for me but my main complaints were

1) It was a short jacket

2) Fiddly zips when it came to remove the outer shell

3) The inner waterproof layer did not work well

The New Model

The new jacket has tried to address these problems

JoeRocket.com

The new jacket is still a three piece unit but consists of

1) Inner fleece vest for warmth. I haven't bothered to bring this with me on the trip as I have a heated vest.

2) Main body of the jacket with built in armour (back, shoulders, elbows) and mesh material down the front of the chest and along the arms

3) Outer waterproof layer that is attached to the Mesh jacket by two large vertical zips, two Velcro tabs at the wrists and a press stud at the neck of the jacket. This works well and only takes a minute or two to join or separate the two pieces

I've been wearing it now for about three months and so far I've experienced hot & humid temps (+35 C), cold (+2 C) and varying levels of rain storms.

The Good Bits

There is now a tall fitting that has longer arm/body lengths. I'm 6'3" and a thin build so this works well for me. You can only get the tall fitting in black.

The old jacket used elastic cords to pull the jacket in around the waist. These cords would fail after a while but now they have Velcro pull tight fasteners.

There are a couple of vertical zips on the vest for ventilation for when you want a small amount of air circulating without the hassle of separating the two parts of the jacket. They work surprisingly well.

It is easy to assemble/disassemble the two parts, it takes less than a couple of minutes

In hot weather I normally shove the outer shell on the back of bike under the elastic tie downs but there is the option to perform jacket origami on the outer shell so that it folds up in to a compact bundle that zips into a built in pouch

The Bad Bits

I don't think the outer shell pockets are very secure unless they are zipped up as the bottom edge of the pocket runs horizontally. I have had coins and other small items fall out when taking the jacket off. Zipped up everything is fine.

The outer shell is described as waterproof, at best it's shower proof. The other day was a big test for the jacket in a torrential downpour in Brazil. In less than five minutes I could feel water running down my shoulders and arms. To be fair this was one of the heaviest storms I've ever experienced, I might as well have been standing in front of a fire hose but I was surprised how quickly it failed. However this is not a show stopper for me as I would normally wear a Dri-rider Thunderwear plastic jacket on top as the first layer of defence. I deliberately didn't do that this time to test the Alter Ego jacket. (FYI later in the day I was in a another downpour for a much longer period of time but this time wearing the Dri-rider jacket as well as the Alter Ego and I was virtually dry, well at worst a bit damp :)

In the cold weather the outer shell works quite well to stop wind but has poor insulation so cold does seep through unless you have extra layers (and/or a heated vest) underneath, I noticed this most on my arms.

I can't make any comment on how it performs to protect me in the case of an accident, I don't want to be involved in any crash tests :)

Conclusion

You can buy a better cold weather jacket, or a better wet weather jacket and probably even better mesh jackets but the advantage of having all three rolled into one appealed to me.

There are better combo jackets available but they are significantly more expensive. I can spend $300 for a jacket but I have a hard time trying to justify when it's $1500.

The problems the jacket has in cold & wet weather I overcome by using layers. I would do this for any combo of bike clothing so it doesn't change the way I ride, for other people this may not work.

Overall I give it a rating of 8-8.5/10.

I hope this has been useful I'll update this post with a long term report or if I experience even more extreme weather conditions. I want to try it in +40 C & low humidity to see how it goes.

Regards

Ian J