Our partner Covec™ Ltd is a company focused on ‘Technical Textiles’ These are textiles made from yarns with engineered solutions, they can be synthetic fibres mixed with natural fibres or engineered synthetic fibres produced to meet performance criteria.
Our partner Covec™ Ltd is a company focused on ‘Technical Textiles’ These are textiles made from yarns with engineered solutions, they can be synthetic fibres mixed with natural fibres or engineered synthetic fibres produced to meet performance criteria.
Covec™ Oneskin Stealth, SP120 LITE and SP120 SR6 are unique laminated and single layer constructions consisting of around 280 up to 450 gsm knitted textiles made of high performance yarn this offers the user strong, lightweight and comfortable protective clothing. Covec materials are tested against EN17092 (draft) for impact and abrasion resistance.
Covec™ Stealth, SP120 LITE and SP120 SR6 offer certain advantages over more traditional materials like Aramids and UHMWPE’s and a lot of advantages over Polyamide yarns (like Nylon) and Polyesters yarns. Depending on the material you compare it with, Covec™ yarn has higher abrasion resistance, higher cut resistance, lower friction heat transfer and is more resistance to wear for prolonged performance. This video provided a detailed explanation.
You don’t want to have to throw your gear away after one season. The first of those properties are rigorous testing. Testing is currently done against EN17092, which is a new testing standard for motorcycle clothing currently in draft. You can read more about EN17092 on our testing page.
Materials need to provide low thermal conductivity and a high melting point, preventing additional consequential burns in a crash scenario.
Grit and glass on the road can be very sharp.
The longer a material protects when sliding over an abrasive surface, the better.
Stealth is tested against EN17092(Draft) to double AA standard (75KPH) all garment cover. SP120 LITE is tested to AAA standard (120KPH) in zonal protection. SP120 SR6 is tested to AAA standard (120KPH) in zonal protection. The polymer in our yarn was tested by NASA as a replacement for Aramids in 2004; it was used for the MARS ROVER space missions providing impact and abrasion protection for the space craft.
Covec™ provides low thermal conductivity and a high melting point, preventing additional consequential burns in a crash scenario. Some jeans use high thermal materials such as UHMWPE’s, Nylon, Polyester and Hi Abrasion Resistant Textiles with low melting points or high thermal conductivity, either way it can burn you or melt to your skin. Clearly materials with high heat conductivity and low melting point are unsuitable in situations where heat is produced due to friction against abrasive road surfaces. Any product may incorporate high performance fibres and yarns but its performance will be defined in certain circumstances by the lowest common denominator in any given situation.
When a material retains moisture it will become weaker over time, with chemicals often functioning as catalyst. Aramids for instance can retain up to 7% of moisture, while Covec™ can only retain 0.01% of moisture. Sweat is an acid between 3.3 and 5 pH, detergents are alkali between 9 and 11 pH, people use bleach for washing, grease and oils are on bikes, etc.
This is the loss of strength after repeated bending or folding (in a washing machine, for instance) in the graph below you see the relative scores.
This is the effect of the yarns in a fabric rubbing against each other. The scores in the graph below are the cycles to break on a standard (dry) yarn-to-yarn abrasion test setup, both Polyamide and Polyester outscore the super fibres.
Information provided by Bull-it- 2018