Comment by watersb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by watersb | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I purchased a North Face jacket at their factory store in Berkeley, mid-1990s, the Gore Tex "Mountain Light" and a fleece "Denali" inner jacket.

It fit me really well, for a 30-year anniversary I decided to get a new one last week. They still make the same design.

The new one uses their nano-spun FutureLight fabric, rather than a three-layer nylon(?)/GoreTex sandwich.

It's much more soft, like a woven fabric rather than plastic hard shell, and it seems to be much less weight. I really like it.

I got to try out Marmot's take on next-gen shell technology a couple of years ago. Half the weight of my 20th century jacket, very effective. The particular jacket I tried didn't fit me as well as the Mountain Light, but I suspect that most people would prefer Marmot's version: more simple, lightweight, everyday tech.

Some things were great 30 years ago; the fleece Denali is essentially the same. The outer layer is much improved.

(And I noticed that the zippers are way better, overall. I bet there's been decades of improvement in plastics (sorry, "polycarbonate") engineering.)

The new stuff sounds great, but how durable is it?

Every time i've come across a new and improved breathable waterproofing technology recently, it comes with the significant downside that the fabric is a lot less durable. When it's raining, i wear my anorak. But when it's not raining, it's rolled up in a plastic bag and bungeed to my bike bag, or shoved into my satchel, or stuffed into a corner of my carry-on luggage. It probably does >10 hours carried for every hour worn! If a fabric can't stand up to that, sadly it doesn't matter how well it performs when i'm wearing it.

On my vintage jacket, the gore Tex membrane itself is less than 5 mils thick. There are freaky chemical burns on the front of it, ate through the tough external facing material, but didn't react to the Teflon. So I can see directly how the laminate was constructed.

I never got around to patching that... but yes there's tough stuff.

The Marmot gear I tried, the "Durable Water Repellent" (DWR) is claimed to be more durable than previous Gore Tex products. That's important because when the surface DWR is dirty with oils or abraded, it will wet out, saturate, and while the PTFE membrane won't leak liquid water, now it's not passing vapor either: you generally end up damp or worse. Condensation etc.

Which is why Gore Tex certification covered the whole process, the final product design.

I don't yet have decades of experience with current products. But honestly comparing them, the newer ones seem to be far superior build quality. That's hard for me to quantify.

The product reviews for the North Face FutureLight gear have noted how they hold up, scrambling over rocks and during Alpine style ascent.

Why did you correct to polycarbonate, a narrow category of plastics? Plastics is a very broad descriptor suitable for capturing all kinds of improvements in plastics and I don’t think any zippers are even made from polycarbonate.

Sort of a joke, sorry. Plastic used to connote poor quality, but now the products have micron-level precision.

Steve Jobs had a beautiful phase 20+ years ago, selling MacBooks made of "the finest German polycarbonate"...

... which at the time, sounded exactly like another great sales pitch from a more elegant age...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corinthian_leather

Some companies, you can tell, have realised the word plastic has negative connotations and try to avoid it, normally they'll use the word polycarbonate instead, I think that was what they were playing on. (I myself hadn't realised it wasn't always possible to substitute in that way).

I think they use polymer, not polycarbonate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com