StripleR675

I've replied to Chris privately. Your playground antics don't warrant a coherent reply...

Says the man who repeatedly makes argumentative personal playground digs...

They've never used only one shell shape on UK market models, different models fit differently. Oriental market models do have differed he'll shapes, to suit their heads.

So why the snide little Pm then? For someone who doesn't come here to argue, you spend a lot of time attempting to turn discussions into argument with your repeated playground personal digs...

And conversely, there's every chance that it will, as I and many, many other people can attest to. You said a helmet "will not prevent you from receiving life threatening injuries", which is exactly what they can, and often do, and is a damn good reason for wearing the best one that you can afford, and not compromising it with gimmicky design features. No, you weren't clear - if you'd said that a helmet may not necessarily prevent life threatening injuries, then that would have been clearer, but the fact is that head injury is the number one cause of motorcycle fatalities (followed by blunt chest trauma), and numerous riders have their lives saved by helmets every day.If my reply caused offence, it wasn't meant to, it was simply a discussion of your previous post.

Me too, since I wouldn't wear any other brand. I'd trust a Shoei without drop down visor, but Arai fit me better, and Shoei's visor mechanism is pants.

No it isn't, it's exactly the point. You said that a helmet won't prevent you from receiving serious or life threatening injuries, which is cobblers - that's exactly what they can do, or there would be no point wearing one. To say that Nakano's crash "has no bearing whatsoever on a motorcycle accident out on the roads" is nonsense. Fortunately I've never had the pleasure of crashing at 200mph,but I have exited bike and said hello tarmac at around 80mph, tumbling down the road in a similar fashion for around a hundred yards (the bike went about 200 yards), banging my head on the floor at least twice (hard enough to scrape through the outer layer of my Arai's shell and expose the woven composite fibres beneath), got up and carried on my journey as a pillion, with nothing more than a bruise on my left hip. Without a helmet I would have been dead, and I wouldn't have wanted to be wearing a lesser manufacturer's offerings either. If you're unlucky enough to go under a car or hit roadside furniture then of course things get more serious - it's rapid deceleration that causes serious and life threatening injuries (hence a car crash victim can be outwardly unmarked, but dead as a door nail because his internal organs have torn away from where they should be and his aorta's pumped all his claret into his chest cavity), and that's exactly what a good helmet is designed to minimise, spreading the point load via the hard outer shell and slowing the deceleration by means of collapsing the EPS liner. Blunt chest trauma is the second biggest killer in motorcycle accidents, but without helmets there would be an awful lot more fatal accidents than there are currently, so your assertion that they don't prevent life threatening injuries just doesn't hold water. Oh, he wasn't wearing an airbag suit either, for the record, just good old fashioned cow skin.

Which is why I was surprised and disappointed at them for jumping on the silly drop down visor bandwagon. Thankfully Arai agree that it compromises safety, and refuse to do it.

Helmets "crumple zone" IS the EPS liner. It's a sacrificial liner, collapsing in impact to absorb energy. The job of the shell is to prevent penetration and spread the impact point load across the EPS liner. If there's a gap between shell and EPS liner it can't do that. For any given shell size you have less thickness of EPS liner with a drop down visor than without - that is common sense, and inarguable fact. To maintain the same EPS thickness you would have to make the shell larger than it needs to be, which is also bad for safety - it increases weight (and therefore impact energy in a crash) and increases loads on the neck and spine. The shell should always be as small as possible - the premium helmet manufacturers don't make different shell sizes for different helmet sizes for the fun of it, it would be a lot cheaper just to make one shell size and fill it out with extra padding, like cheap manufacturers often do.

No they're not. There is no Bsi standard for crash helmets. It was axed many years ago, replaced by the much less stringent EC standard.

Tell that to Shinya Nakano http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1pu4a_bike-crash-nakano_news That's a 200mph crash. I imagine he's rather grateful that Mr Arai tests his helmets for 24 impacts on the same shell, rather than using a new shell for each impact test, like the EC standard testing does (and tests them to a much higher impact force than the EC standard specifies)... We're not talking of "a few thou" difference - the gap in the Shell for drop down internal visors is usually around 5-10mm. That's a substantial amount of EPS liner (and therefore protection) that you've given up in exchange for a silly gimmick.

An internal drop down visor occupies space that would otherwise be taken up by EPS liner. If you have less thickness of EPS liner it can't absorb the same amount of energy as a thicker liner. Simple common sense (and the reason Arai refuse to make a helmet with internal drop down visor). As already said, an ACU gold sticker is meaningless, they're just a fund raiser for the ACU. No additional testing is done.

Yes. Why wouldn't I. You can't see very well through it when it's covered with flies.

For you maybe. For me they're a solution to a problem that doesn't exist, at the cost of compromised safety. I swap visors once a day, if I stay out after dark, and it takes seconds - there is no faff. If I'm stopping anywhere for more than a couple of minutes then chances are I'll be taking my visor off to clean it anyway.

Can't argue with any of that. If a driver isn't looking properly he's not going to see you whether you're all in black, or dressed in hi vis wally gear with a strobe light equipped codpiece. I've always like black lids. My first two Arais were plain black (well, the second was pearl black) . As is my RX7 Corsair - looks v cool with black visor on. My Astro is black, silver and pearl white - I like subtle paint jobs, rather than garish. Matches my silver, black and white favourite Furygan jacket well too.