Safety Gear

[Frankenstein]

Anyone else notice the thread being like 9 months oldoor something?

I absolutely say wear a helmet. I knew somebody who stupidly enough was playing chicken with random traffic about 10 years ago, he was lucky enough to be killed almost immediately after being thrown 20 some feet after getting hit by a car. Now if he would have been wearing a helmet then 10 years ago probably wouldn't have been the last time I talked to him due to a fist sized hole in the back of his head. Parents got divorced and his mother gave up believing in God.

I try not to f*** up myself or the lives of people around me, in the last couple of years I can admit at least twice either my helmet saved my life or at least prevented what would been a really bad head injury (which are just as good at paralyzing you as a bad neck snapper, with the added bonus of going blind or giving you seizures for the rest of your life.)

Not to mention helmets slide over asphalt better than hair and skin do, a bare head does a much better job of gripping into the ground and being twisted under you while the weight of your body keeps moving. This is why motorcycle gear has hard plastic plates, so you can slide down to a stop instead of crumpling and then rolling/tumbling over until you stop. Bicycle helmets use this feature as a thin plastic layer over the Styrofoam insides, if it was just painted foam it would catch easier and be more likely to drag your head under you instwad of letting you keep your head straight.

Oh and one of those incidents was I experienced was just from pulling into an open spot between parked cars on the road, plastic cup was laying there and since I was braking to a stop as soon as my front wheel hit the cup it locked up and slid out from under me causing me to fall over and hit my (helmeted) head on the curb. The plastic cup is basically what's on the outside of a helmet, and should slide very easily on the ground, I'd rather have that than pressing my neck snapping limit which shouldn't be hard if I my head acted more like a rubber wheel did on hard blacktop.

 

[Scooterduder]

I agree that helmets must be worn. I cracked a bicycle helmet in 1997 on my mountain bike, on the sidewalk, and lost 12 hours of memory. I was fine and released from the hospital after 4 hours. Glad I had a helmet. Sometimes it's easy for us to think that a helmet doesn't need to be worn on a short slow trip, but it does. How much space does it take to have an incident? Not much. I've been using my bicycle helmet, but I also bought a Bell Pit Boss, that I'll definitely use when my bike has a greater top speed. If you have a huge head like mine, try the Bell Pit Boss before all the others.

 

[FurryOnTheInside]

Anyone else notice the thread being like 9 months oldoor something?

Yeah I was going to reply to the thread then I noticed that I already had my say several months ago.

I got a new helmet though and it isn't retro in the slightest but I'll tell you anyway.
I wanted a full face option for occasional use (as I do have open face MTB and roadie cycling helmets already) but I didn't want a large or overweight helmet, don't believe I need a motorcycle helmet for my peculiar uses, and I didn't really want a motocross-looking downhill MTB helmet that has poor aerodynamics.
So I got this "Phantom X" hang gliding and skydiving helmet.

It has a large visor with very wide and high field of view that especially useful in a very prone riding position, as in a speed tuck... or when hang gliding/ skydiving/ maybe sliding down a bobsleigh track on a "skeleton" hehe! It does look similar to the helmets worn by the skeleton riders at the winter Olympics last week.

I really like that despite being a full face helmet it is much closer in size to my open face MTB helmet than it is to my old heavy bmx helmet that I used to use in the woods and always hated wearing.
I think it's a nice option for certain uses in certain places. It is not a DOT approved helmet.