At the conclusion of a recent TOMBAY, my helmet made contact with a road reflector resulting in a ding in the helmet. Much prefer a ding in the helmet than in my cranium.

Worth the purchase price?

YES!!!

Once.

John

It's good to know mconlonx is so in touch with the severity of our injuries. And that the helmet I was wearing probably did not save my life, despite me barely living with it on.

Ben

Obviously neither I nor mconlonx know the details of your particular incident. However, I do know that before bicycle helmets became widely available I knew of a few serious accidents and a single fatality among the cyclists with whom I was familiar. Since helmets became popular and almost universally worn among the cyclists I ride with I now know of a few more serious accidents and sadly one more fatality.

However, I have also been told by dozens of these cyclists that their lives were saved because they were wearing a helmet. If all those stories were true I would have expected far more fatalities in the pre-helmet era, but in fact I knew of no more then than I do now. So while I can't say anything definite about any one particular incident, I do conclude that most statements about a life-saving helmet are false.

FULL STOP. (And that includes so-called "doctors" willing to make a diagnosis over the internut.)

-mr. bill

Are you purposely ignoring the second part of the statement I made?

Do you think that everyone who has ever said "A helmet saved my life!" has had their lives saved by wearing a helmet?

My helmet story involves going over the bars and landing on my head, in the street. I ended up with what I think was probably a very mild concussion. When I examined the helmet, I saw that the foam liner had compressed as intended, also that the liner and shell had cracked in the impact area.

I believe that the helmet helped mitigate injury, certainly scalp abrasion and possible contusion, potentially a more serious concussion or skull fracture.

Did it save my life? Probably not. But maybe. Did it mitigate injury? Probably. But maybe not.

So it is perfectly acceptable to claim that a helmet saved your life...

...provided you attach the proper disclaimers to the end.

(I'm a graphic artist at a marketing firm. Our biggest clients are an auto maker and a pharmaceutical company -- I spend a lot of time making sure the jobs I work on have the correct disclaimers in place. :))

I didn't keep any of the evidence. It didn't occur to me in 1978 that I might need to carry the helmet and documentation around for 35 years and many moves to establish credibility on the internet. I did (as best as my memory and experience recall) spend 5 days in a coma in IC at Mass General Hospital, was CAT scanned twice, found to have clots in my hypothalamus and bruising on the base of my spinal cord; the cause of my right side seizures and subsequent lose of all right side motor skills with the first scan, then all clear the second. I did not have any injury around my right front skull where my helmet foam was crushed to half thickness. (This was the Mk 1 Bell Biker with its near indestructible soft plastic shell and very firm foam.) I walked (quite unsteadily) out of that hospital after a three week stay. 4 month later, I had my appetite back. (The hypothalamus.) I relearned most of the motor skills. (Still cannot ice skate, one of my joys.)

The broken fork stayed at the bike shop owned by the guy I was going to ride with that fateful day. I don't know where the helmet ended up. I suppose my CAT scans are somewhere. I never saw them. My mom was horrified that I brought these beautiful felt lined leather straps with brass buckles home and quickly tossed them. They were used to hold my wrists to the bedside while I was in seizure. I had no memory of them or any other part of my week in IC. I had never seen the IC before when I walked in during a follow up visit to the neurosurgeon (and apparently I was such a mess then that my IC charge nurse didn't recognize me when I knocked on the IC door!). Word of my injury apparently spread like wildfire and Boston became one of Bell's leading markets. (That 's my conjecture but I had fun for years walking into bike shops I had never been in before, hanging out at the new helmet displays and having the salesmen tell me about my accident!)

Oh, my riding companion at the time was an aid in a neurosurgical emergency unit. I suspect he had some idea of what he was looking at and he would have been the source for the information getting out to the bike world.

One of my few memories of my hospital stay was of walking my corridor and into rooms of folk who were not going to recover from their head injuries. I had no idea what had happened to me, but I sure didn't want to be one of them!

The crash happened when I hopped a ditch at a construction site. It was repaved but the new pavement was an inch lower so I always hopped it. My regular training ride. That day, my Lambert fork decided it had lived its life and wasn't there when I landed. I was going probably 35 at the time. (The next year, nothing had changed and I hopped that ditch another several hundred times but on forks I trusted.) There was no evidence I ever got my hands off the bars or attempted any roll and lots that this took me completely by surprise.

So when folk tell me that my helmet might/might not have saved my life, I tend to be a little sensitive. And no, I didn't attempt to address all the other "my helmet saved my life" claims. None of my business. But if someone tells me to my face "maybe", they will hear from me.

Ben

No injury at the site of the helmet impact, to me, makes your claim that the helmet had anything to do with your survival quite suspect. I won't argue that it didn't keep your from having a nice big cut on your forehead, but a hit hard enough to almost KILL you would very likely bruise you at least as the foam compressed against your head.

Believe me, I'm happy you survived just like I'm happy I survived getting hit from behind on a 25mph road on a bright sunny day. I can't say a helmet saved my life because I didn't even have one on, nor did I hit my head (my ass took the brunt of my fall resulting in a few fractured vertebrae in my back). Did the chamois in my bike shorts keep my back from breaking entirely? Highly doubtful, though it did keep me from getting road rash in an awkward to bandage area! No naked bike rides for me ;)

Are you kidding? 5 Days in a coma and there's no evidence the helmet helped? Well then there is also no evidence the helmet didn't help save his life, or the quality of his life that he has may have been much improved because of the helmet so in a way the helmet may also have "saved" his life... ;)

You can receive a concussion without even hitting your head.

I have had at least one where I did not hit my head along with the several others I have had since that accident. Loose brain syndrome. But all evidence says I hit my head before any other contact on that big one. Then the back of the same side shoulder. Busted collarbone.

And as far as bruising from impacts? I wouldn't know. It was two weeks before I was aware of much of anything re: my body. And those bruises, if they were there would have been far down the list of injuries to be treated and monitored. But they might account for my IC charge nurse not recognizing me a few weeks later. Never thought of that before. I would guess any external bruises would be below the collarbone in the priority list and the collarbone got zero attention until after IC (and set quite distorted).

Ben

You obviously hit the ground hard. Collarbones don't break themselves! You mentioned earlier 'no injury' at the site of the impact to your helmet. I took that as literally nothing to see there. It sounds like you simply meant nothing as serious as your other injuries.

The fact remains that no two bike crashes are the same. For the anti helmet types to state that someones reported crash with a helmet saved their life is wrong and purely false. There is no possible way they could know the mechanics of the accident.

There aren't many, if any, anti-helmet types who post here.

And it's not the bareheaders claiming that someone's reported crash with a helmet saved their life... Usually that's the helmeteer claim, and most of the time, it is probably an incorrect assumption.

What are your qualification to say their claim is "probably an incorrect assumption"?

I'm not judging you, unlike some people here I'm not arrogant enough to assume I'm in a position to tell others what kind of risks they should or shouldn't take, but what I take away from your story is NOT that I should wear a helmet, but that I shouldn't hop ditches at 35mph.

(In the hypothetical case I would do so, I probably would opt for something more robust than a cycling helmet to protect myself btw.)

Wow, a whole lot of judging going on in that non-judgmental reply.

I don't know if you are ignorant, but google "death fork." (Even though nobody died as a result of the "death fork" - no thanks to the fork.)

Of the 30,000 Lambert forks, 30 failed causing 12 injuries before Yamaha recalled them. One of the injuries is reported here.

FWIW, by helmet-science denial math, a Lambert fork isn't dangerous since there's a 99.96% chance that the fork won't ever ever ever hurt you.

-mr. bill

The fact that I don't fancy climbing the mount Everest, because I think it's too dangerous for my liking, doesn't necessarily mean I'm being judgmental about mountaineers. Something similar goes for jumping ditches at 35mph. It's probably hard to grasp for a helmeteer like you, but if you try hard enough, maybe you will one day understand that some people are unwilling to take certain risks without judging people who take those risks.

If a fork fails at on a cycling path while going 15 mph, or in other words, during the type of cycling I typically do, there's a much better chance you will walk away from it, then when it fails upon landing after hopping a ditch at 35mph. It's not very hard to understand, but maybe all the Styrofoam interferes with your brain function or something.

I said "ditch" but it was a ditch dug months before for utiity access (a house aws going up at the site) and had been re-filled and paved. THe new pavement sat about an inch below the old, so there was a chance pinch flats, dented rims and simply a rather rude event on the ride. Simple solution was to just bunnyhop it. We all did. Not a big deal. I had done it a hundred times before that crash and many more times the next season.


The Lambert fork came in three different versions. I had the first. It has some pretty incredibly bad engineering. Follow this if you can. The fork and crown was a one piece casting/forging (I have no idea what the process was). The casting included a plug that extended up about an inch. The steerer was a steel tube. That steel tube came down to the top of the crown and stopped, pressed over that plug. So that plug was machined down to the inside diameter of the steerer with a hard machined corner at the inside of the steerer. No radius at all. And of course, no eyes were ever going to see that corner because ti was completely hidden by the steerer which was then covered by the headset. I know that because I held that fork in my hands after the fact when the steerer tube was miles away with the rest of the bike.

It didn't take Lambert very long to figure out that detail was bad. Not very many were made. (I don't know the numbers.) The next two versions were (I believe) drilled through and the steerer press fit in. (I just did some very simple math. That plug was 22.2" diameter (English quill/inside of steerer). A 22.2 mm circle has an area of 0.600 sq inches. So the entire fork is reduced to 6/10s of a square inch at the most stressed location of the fork, a classic cantilever bean with no redundancy. And to add to that, there is a stress concentration (the hard corner) right there. This is second semester sophomore year stuff, not high theory.

Ben

what you have to ask yourself:

would you make your 8 year old daughter wear a helmet if she had to cycle 5 miles everyday to school and back?

if yes, why dont you wear a helmet yourself? (suppose its a macho thing ....i.e. I'm rough and I'm tough and I don't need a helmet)

I dont wear crimpelene and lycra, but a helmet and a high viz jacket are essential

And after you ask yourself this, you have to realize that for a great many things there are other rules for 8 year olds then there are for adults. In this case, however, members of the Dutch Cycling Master Race including Yours Truly generally think cycling helmets are also bull**** for them kiddies:

If you're going to answer your question yourself, why do you even bother to ask? Not that your answer is an accurate representation of the typical motivation for the choice to not wear a helmet...

I never made my kids wear helmets, even though it is the law around here. Oddly enough, none of them died, and they all rode their bicycles all over the place. Go figure.

Also, I ride to work daily in dress clothes, none of that stupid high-viz crap for me. Done that for years. Guess what, I'm not dead.

I would be far, far more concerned that she was properly trained and confident in riding on the roads with traffic than anything else. I wouldn't stop her from wearing a helmet if she wanted to, but I wouldn't force it on her either.

Again, I'm far more concerned with active lighting (when needed) than hi-vis clothing. Even the brightest hi-vis jacket won't show up at all with the sun low in the sky in the eyes of drivers.