GHill762

Wait, a cop asked you? are you legally obligated to wear a helmet on a bicycle in WA?

wphamilton

I think that Gorilla glue eats away the Styrofoam. I'm not sure what adhesive works though.

modelmartin

Elmer's wood glue should be fine.

DiabloScott

I think you can just break that chunk off - but you might have a problem keeping the head strap in place.

Biker395 

Sell it on eBay.

"slightly used"

wphamilton

Probably. But I think I'd try a hot glue gunn. Then put some Gorilla tape over the broken shell part, good as new.

Pamestique 

I replace mine every 5 years for the same reason plus I know I drop my helmets, bang them next to stuff etc so better safe than sorry.

I always get a kick out of seeing someone wearing one of those old Bell helmets, even today! I remember them as really hot and heavy! Modern helmets are just so muh more comfortable. Recently working an mountain bike ride (Rwanda 50), Tom Ritchey came by (with his wife, on a MTB tandem) and he was wearing a "hairnet" - I assume from the "day"... no one makes those anymore do they?

badger1

I just wait for my current helment© to asplode spontaneously; then I buy a new one.

Pamestique 

Everyone knows helmet is to be replace once there is an impact/crash....right? It gets one good knock, that's it, Needs to be replaced!

fietsbob

I heard It may be true i if by WA you mean Western Australia.. Perth , etc.

MinnMan

JohnJ80 - thanks for the very useful information (and best wishes for your son's full recovery). I wasn't aware of the MIPS technology - it looks very intriguing. Sure, no helmet will completely prevent concussions, but something that may help a little is, in my opinion, a great step in the right direction.

Unfortunately, there don't seem to be too many MIPS-compliant helmets available in the US yet. Scott seems to have some MTB helmets that don't look too bad. The Lazer Helium MIPS looks sweet, but apparently won't be in stores until September....

JohnJ80

Thanks. He's doing fine but in a lot of ways, that's luck of the draw.

I guess from what I've seen as a ski patroller is if you helmet gets damaged it saved you at some significant level and I'd have to believe that was true in your case too. It takes a pretty fair shot to damage a helmet (from experience). I've rescued people who have had their helmet split into two and were fine - clearly saved by the helmet. I'd have to dig out the statistics, but I think with respect to fatalities the numbers are pretty dramatic but with respect to concussion/TBI, not so much and that's where the DAI issues come in.

Here's the link - MIPS | Take a look in the issue Popular Science. Thanks for finding that.

Yeah, after hanging around both inpatient and outpatient rehab facilities for over a year, I can tell you it's just heartbreaking to watch TBI patients struggle with trying to come back after an injury like that. Imagine what it feels like when you can't trust your very own brain anymore and it feels like it's "lying" to you. Imagine what it would be like to have to relearn how to interact socially again when to all outward appearances you look just like you did pre-accident. That's a really hard one.

The problem is that pretty much anyone you talk to does not realize that most helmets today do not provide any real protection from DAI, yet, in many ways, that's the debilitating part of the whole thing. If you've ever been close to the struggles that a TBI patient has to go through, you'd see the huge value in adding something like the MIPS technology to the protection of your head.

Taking all the discussions we've had over this, and all the reading, it like there is a certain level of acceleration/deceleration above which you start to sustain damage at an exponential rate. If you can push the acceleration experienced by the brain in the skull below or close to that threshold, you get significant reductions in injury. That's where something like the MIPS stuff is so important. In our case, had we had a MIPS helmet on our son, my guess is that we would have seen a significantly reduced injury and a corresponding improvement in speed of rehab. From all the stuff I've read and the the medical people I've talked to, because of the exponential nature of the damage with acceleration, there should be a huge benefit.


Certainly there is an element of helmet manufacturers benefiting by shorter replacement cycles. But the concern is real - they don't know how you are going to treat your equipment, and they do know that you cannot visually tell if a helmet is still functional. So what else would you do?

Having been through this, I just don't see it as a gamble worth taking. Protecting my head aligns with protecting their liability in this case and it certainly can't hurt. Discovering the marginal difference of replacing a helmet perhaps too frequently against the debilitating recovery time and possible permanent disability would seem to be pointless. If you find out that your injury would have been mitigated by a better helmet after you're injured, you'd pay orders of magnitude more to unwind the issue had you known prior. Been there, done that and I've learned that lesson big time.

bruce19

Agreed. I have no doubt my helmet helped. I just don't know how much or from what. And, having been an MSF Instructor, I'm just used to motorcycle helmets being so much more than bicycle helmets. I certainly wouldn't ride a bike without one. Glad to hear your son is progressing.

GHill762

his location is Spokane WA (Washington)

fietsbob

I heard that the Aussies passed a mandatory bike helmet law.. I know Washington state didn't.

Australia also makes a penalty, a fine, for Not Voting.

GHill762

just reading some articles on google it looks like there are helmet laws in certain citys in Washington but nothing state-wide..

yeah, Aus is a different place altogether.. their traffic laws are odd too..

Zinger

City ordinance in Spokane

bruce19

Coincidently I jumped on my Ducati today and went down to the local brew pub for lunch. While sitting outside reading two roadies walked over to the table next to me for lunch. One was carrying a POC helmet. Naturally I engaged them on the subject of the helmet. For the sake of brevity I'll cut to the chase. They said they (they were a couple) bought the helmet for it's superior protection. They also said that "heat management" was an issue. Apparently the wearer found himself with sweat dripping into his eyes whenever he wore it on a hot day.

Zinger

Sweat in my eyes has always been an issue for me and I've always worn a headband. Luckily my mail order '90s helmet fits perfectly over a headband.

bruce19

Although I sweat less than most I always use a headband.

MinnMan

Yeah, the POC is one of those MIPS compliant helmets. I took a look at it and immediately thought "not well ventilated". The LAZER HELIUM MIP thing looks better. The Scott, too.

Doug64

This is the helmet that replaced a helmet the emergency room doctor told me to replace, as he dug dirt out of my ear and put in 21 stitches. This one, less than a year old, has already been replaced--2 new helmets in a year. My latest helmet is the 5th helmet in the last 7 yeas. None of them were replaced because I did not like the color Well that is not entirely true. The one I had the longest faded from yellow to white, besides being pretty beat up from rough handling etc. I thought that was enough UV exposure to affect its functionality. I'm not sure why we get cheap or take chances on safety items like helmets and tires. I'll look at the Lazer Helium MIP when they are available.

tcs

Yeah, there are some helmets around that are dual certified to the CPSC bike standard and the ASTM multi-impact skateboard/BMX standard that use EPP. Off the top of my head*, there's the Protec Ace SXP.

So far as I know (and I'd love to wrong about this), all one can say is that there are some technologies that the proprietary manufacturers claim deal with DAI. Unfortunately, when the empirical data was analyzed, so-called 'anti-concussion' helmets for other sports and activities fell far short of manufacturers' ad copy (1, 2, 3, 4).


*Pardon the pun!

Looigi

I always replace my helmet after X years where 0.5 < X < 15

JohnJ80

All of those articles are almost exclusively oriented towards repetitive high contact sports like football, hockey, soccer etc... Helmet design is distinctly different for those sports than for "once and done" sorts of protection like bike helmets, skiing helmets, etc... which rely on destruction of the helmet for protection against a singular event. The phenomena of repetitive impacts and the damage that they produce is different than the DAI style of injury that is present in a major traumatic event. A good lay perspective on this is the New Yorker Article by Malcolm Gladwell. The applications are vastly different.

MIPS is probably the leading technology. It's proprietary in the sense that MIPS developed it and owns the IP which they license to (any) helmet manufacturers. So there are multiple manufacturers with the technology in their helmets and it is not proprietary to the manufacturer although I suppose some narrow method in how to implement or manufacture it might be.

Measuring the effectivity of an anti-concussion technology is just very difficult in actual practice since it's got the same characteristics that testing firecrackers does. It's hard to measure a specific incident and know if it worked or it didn't work and you don't get to go back and try it again until the user gets a concussion. So the only real way to do this is to get a lot of units out there and follow over time - with all the problems that presents. That said, I'm comfortable with simulation technology as a decent start to give us a good idea of what works and what doesn't.

J.