As part of a birthday present to my self, so to speak, I decided to upgrade my old riding gear. And by old, I mean only 1-week old. Why so fastidious, you may ask… Mainly because I wanted to take my riding more seriously, and that called for more serious gear. Just to note, the previous stuff included a Shoei RF-1100 helmet, Alpinestars S-MX 2 boots, Alpinestars GMX gloves, and a RS-Taichi RSJ826 jacket. The Shoei fit me perfectly in the beginning, but only after a week the padding broke in so much that the helmet felt loose. So I sold that. There wasn’t much wrong with the boots, but they were “short” boots and I didn’t really see a purpose for them. I was actually able to return them to the store. Similar story goes for the gloves, they were short gloves rather than full gauntlets. So far I’m still stuck with the RS-Taichi jacket, but I might just keep it for casual riding, we’ll see…
When I got back home from Dallas yesterday, I was greeted with a few packages in the garage. My new helmet and gloves were in there. Unfortunately, I caught the cold or flu the night before and couldn’t do much more than unbox and try on the gear. I remember waking up in the middle of the night and feeling a familiar soreness in the throat… that’s when I knew I was going to be in some sh*t the next few days. I am grateful that I didn’t get sick in the middle of the week during work. Aside from my throat feeling like it was on fire and feeling fatigued/feverish most of today, I currently feel better… I bought some Cold-Eeze as soon as I felt sick, so maybe it did something.
Anyway, enough of that crap, back to the gear. I got an AGV GP-Tech in the Rossi 5-Continents scheme. I’m very pleased with the helmet, those Italians really know how to make stuff. The inner lining even has some ornamental embroidery. I also picked up a tinted Iridium Blue shield to go with it, you can’t really see the Blue/Purple hue in these pictures though. 
6 Exhaust vents in the rear that account for this helmet’s great flowing characteristics.
One thing I didn’t like was the fact that the shield mechanism needed adjusting. For such an expensive helmet, you’d think everything would be handled from the factory. With the shield down, one side had more of a gap than the other. It took some tinkering with the screws holding down the plates to even things the sides and flush out the gaps.
Next, I decided to go with the Alpinestars GP-Pro gloves. There’s a funny back story to this, I almost bought these gloves from someone off craigslist for $100 off retail… not to be stereotypical, but the guy had a fobby accent and suspiciously had a batch of these gloves from some “dealer” friend of his. When we met up, they were undoubtedly fake. People are copying everything these days.
I’m still waiting on some boots, but I will post the suit together with it later.
can’t wait to see the boots. lol
hey, i was wondering how you found out the gp pros were fake, because oddly enough, i am meeting up with a chinese guy who posted on craigslist too. Thanks
Just by examining it, you can definitely tell something is off with them… that and the packaging. Make sure to look for proper packaging and Alpinestars tags etc. the fake ones only had a generic plastic bag