Harbor Freight Reviews

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Item: Roping Gloves
Item number: 35166
Retail price: $7.99
Frequent sale price: $4.99
Target price: $4.99 (drops to $3.99 with 20%-off coupon)
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I buy several pair of these gloves a year. They're my favorite all-round glove for working in the yard, moving equipment, and other general work around the home and shop. The fit is reasonably good and they generally wear well, although occasionally I get a pair that split at the seams prematurely. The leather is supple enough for a good sense of feel, providing just enough distance from your work piece to keep your hands clean and protected while providing a good sense of feel for what you're handling.

By working glove standards these are soft leather gloves. For anyone who has every owned a pair of Italian leather driving gloves, you know that "soft" is a relative term (there's that Einstein stuff again). But we're working men and women when here at Harbor Freight Reviews, so we'll call them "soft leather gloves" within this context.

Years ago I gave up that rough, working-man look (or more correctly, feel) for the softer, more gentile hands of a 'surgeon.' Nothing wrong with those well-earned calluses, it's just not my style anymore. (If you don't understand the difference, you need to shake hands with more ladies. Trust me, you'll figure it out quickly, especially if you're a big guy whom they expect to have big, rough hands.) Enter soft leather roping (AKA working) gloves: they keep the hands soft and uncallused yet they don't give that clumsy feeling that thicker, less supple leather gloves produce. Of course for real heavy work a heavier pair of gloves is demanded, but I personally seldom do really heavy work. Thus, these are my all-round favorite gloves and we enthusiastically recommend them to everybody. I have different pairs with various degrees of wear-and-tear for different applications -- the old, well-worn pair are delegated to yard work, while the new, clean pairs I keep in my vehicles for unexpected materials handling (e.g. lumber or plywood pick-up).

There are a lot of better quality roping gloves on the market. You'd generally expect to pay $20 to $30 for good-quality roping gloves. If you work as a laborer or other professional who needs this type of glove for continuous use, you may want to invest in a better quality glove. For those of us who only occasionally do manual work or do only light work, these are the gloves to buy saving a lot off the cost of better-quality roping gloves.

If you like splitters from handling plywood and those rough calluses from shoveling and raking, these gloves aren't for you. But once you discover that you don't have to trash-up your hands to do work, you'll not want to go back to roughing it. And then there's the ladies . . .

Bottom line: The best all-round glove for light work around the home or shop. Sold down-right cheap when on sale at Harbor Freight. You can even use a 20%-off coupon almost stealing a pair of these soft leather gloves for just $3.99!