I sported the 0.8 version on this morning's commute. Very comfortable, a great improvement over the standard cheap styro-covers. Yet compared to bare-headed riding it still leaves something to be desired.

These standard hats are basically designed to allow air flow through strips, front to back, and consequently block air flow along the covered strips. And blocked in the very front. That's backwards for cooling when you think about it. It should be more open at front and promote air flow at every point across the width of the head, at some point near the front.

A radical re-design is out of scope here, since unsurprisingly the Bell and Schwinn had basically identical skeletons with (possibly cosmetic) differences in the space between ribs. So I can't do much with that. However, I have a tentative scheme for version 0.7 which really will wait for my Chinese fake carbon fiber covering. It occurred to me that I don't really need all the ribs to continuously contact my head. I still have some room to carve out on the underside, where it's not visible to casual inspection. So I'm going to cut some angled channels in the ribs, drill some vent holes in front, and I think add some vent panels in the front voids to distribute the initial air flow.

Plan B would be to simply drill a bunch of holes in the ribs from the top and front, at whatever angle the hat usually is with respect to ground plane. But my intuition is that the holes will eliminate the "cyclist equipment" appearance so that's definitely a fallback plan.