Rab Men's Firewall Jacket Waterproof Stretch Active Jacket All-Year-Round

Product Information

Classic Velcro-tabbed cuffs work over or under bulky winter gloves and characteristic longish sleeves don't ride up either - Photo: Lukasz Warzecha (lwimages.co.uk)

Outdoors Magic: Demon pit-zips, nice, quiet fabric with stretch, decent breathability, good cut and at a super-competitive price too. The cut is good. Sleek and athletic without great wads of unnecessary excess fabric, but still allowing easy movement and as we’ve come to expect from Rab, slightly longer than average sleeves works well for climbing and scrambling. There’s no tendency for them to rise up anyway, but if your ape index is substantial, it’s good to know. Demon Pit-Zips! Specifically, PU layers can now be micro-engineered to maximise breathability. And our experience of Shield+ is that it’s appreciably more breathable than the original Pertex Shield (no ‘+’) fabric and on a par with all but the very best rival materials. On top of that, the fabric feels lovely and is pleasantly quiet in use too, which makes a nice change. Testing the hood with a helmet on in the shower, we found the collar to be perhaps a bit too wide open, while the wire brim of the hood wasn't quite wide enough. More disconcerting was how little effect the DWR coating on the Firewall had.When buying Waterproof, the quality of the product is going to be one of the factors that you really scrutinise before you commit to buying. The stretch material combined with a spacious and non-constricting fit means the Firewall was an optimal choice for activities like ice climbing that require a lot of mobility in an upper-body garment. The length for me came down to around upper hips and the only thing I noticed was that the sleeves, in relation to the rest, were quite long. I actually quite like them to be like this because it allows good freedom of movement when reaching up and it also allows you to pull your hands up inside (which I often do when walking in the rain).

Rear adjuster cord grips the top of the head so the hood moves with your direction of gaze - Photo: Lukasz Warzecha (lwimages.co.uk) A lightweight, versatile 3-layer Pertex® Shield hardshell. Waterproof and with a slight stretch, it has a helmet compatible, stowable hood, refined sleeve articulation and deep underarm vents, great for winter hillwalking and mountaineering. Pertex® Shield 3-Layer construction waterproof technology with fluorocarbon free DWR (120gsm) HH: 20,000mm/MVTR: 20,000 g/m2/24hrs The Firewall is described as a regular fit (sized to allow layering underneath) and I found this to be a generous fit for my 40 inch chest at size medium. I could comfortably layer a base layer and a couple of mid weight synthetic layers underneath. Plus the conventional PU-coated water-resistant YKK main-zip isn’t as smooth flowing as the swankier molded-tooth YKK Vislon type, but we can live with that.The fabric feels lovely and is pleasantly quiet in use too. No more sounding like a plastic bottle being blown down the street every time the wind gets up’ There are however some methods that you can use to determine a product’s quality without needing to physically have it.

In our controlled stationary bike breathability testing, we did not find the Pertex Shield+ membrane to be noticeably more breathable than the Gore-Tex Pro membranes found in the Patagonia Pluma. It was hot and sweaty in there until we opened up the vents. We loved the combination of the full-length arm vents, which Rab calls "Escape Artist" vents because having the sleeves fully unzipped makes them very easy to simply slip your arms out of for optimal ventilation and heat buildup relief. There was a time when that meant second-best performance, but developments in fabric technology mean that’s no longer the case. An updated classic, a hard-wearing, hard-working rain shell, you know you can rely on regardless of what the weather has in store for you. Rab says: When it came to mobility, we loved how much the stretchy fabric did stretch, and the larger fit meant that we experienced no constrictions of any sort as we moved about. We also appreciated how quiet the fabric was as we moved, a nice contrast with the noisier Patagonia Pluma and Arc'teryx Alpha FL, which were both made using a Gore-Tex Pro membrane. Venting and BreathabilityAnother factor that can be a great indication of product quality is the brand. Brands like Rab are of course extremely well known, especially for Waterproof.