BEST HELMET???

[Powking77]

I'm fairly new to snowmobiling.....only in my 2nd serious season. I have a Fullmer helmet right now that seems to be heavy but serves its purpose. I'm thinking about going with a new helmet for this season.......any thoughts from someone with more experience in sledding than me on what the best helmet to have is?

 

[modsledr]

"search" is your friend

 

[tudizzle]

the one on your head when you need it.....nothing will beat it

 

[MtnMaxMod]

I'm fairly new to snowmobiling.....only in my 2nd serious season. I have a Fullmer helmet right now that seems to be heavy but serves its purpose. I'm thinking about going with a new helmet for this season.......any thoughts from someone with more experience in sledding than me on what the best helmet to have is?

Any name brand helmet..

(in no particular order)
-HJC
-Sixsixone
-Fly
-Shift
-One ind.
-509
-Fox

etc..

 

[ronniehotdogg]

509 is the best fit on the market. I think they are the only one making hemets made for snowmobiling only. I love mine

 

[Trenchmaster]

I agree with ronniehotdogg the 509 helmet is great, comfy and light, with good sledding graphics on it. The 509 sinister goggles fit great in the face opening for a nice warm ride, I love mine!!

 

[milehighassassin]

Here is a good read on helmets. I could care less how a helmet looks. I want it to be comfortable and protect my noggan. Alright, I care somewhat about looks, but the other two are more important to me:

Long read, with lots of details on testing of helmets:
http://www.motorcyclistonline.com/gearbox/motorcycle_helmet_review/index.html

When I say long I mean it. Get a cup of coffee or three.

 

[Powking77]

I have heard of the 509 helmets but haven't known anyone personally that rides with one. I'll have to check it out. I have also heard Klim makes one kinda tailored for sledding.....any experience with that one?

 

[backcountryislife]

Just a little review:

I've had a few small crashes with my DH helmets, but never anything significant until a few days ago. I decided to eat a tree & then a rock on my DH bike at around 25-30 (good times...)

The helmet took the hit & did its job perfectly, the shell was damaged from the hit on the rock, which is part of what kept the impact from damaging me instead of my helmet. I'm VERY surprised, with how fast & hard I hit how I feel nothing on my head or neck. My back on the other hand... ow. The odds that I would have a crash like that on my sled are very low, but that kind of crash happens a lot on a DH bike.

Giro remedy btw.

 

[bdoe22]

DOT VS. SNELL

do yourself a favor and google dot vs. snell. theses are safety ratings that are placed on helmets in the US. this will allow you to make an educated decision on your helmet purchase. your helmet choice should be based on what type of riding you do. if you boondock and are a very active rider, i would look into the F4 from klim or a similar helmet with lots of venting. i currently have a bell moto-8 with the snow kit and it works excellent.

I think right now the FLY Trophy 2 is prolly the best deal on the market at around a $130 for a snell 2010, good graphics and excellent venting, its tough to beat.

the HJC CLX6 is another great choice and has proven to be a great SNELL approved helmet for around $150.

lots of helmet choices out there, first thing i would do is decide if you are going to trust a DOT only helmet.

 

[milehighassassin]

do yourself a favor and google dot vs. snell. theses are safety ratings that are placed on helmets in the US. this will allow you to make an educated decision on your helmet purchase. your helmet choice should be based on what type of riding you do. if you boondock and are a very active rider, i would look into the F4 from klim or a similar helmet with lots of venting. i currently have a bell moto-8 with the snow kit and it works excellent.

I think right now the FLY Trophy 2 is prolly the best deal on the market at around a $130 for a snell 2010, good graphics and excellent venting, its tough to beat.

the HJC CLX6 is another great choice and has proven to be a great SNELL approved helmet for around $150.

lots of helmet choices out there, first thing i would do is decide if you are going to trust a DOT only helmet.

Just read the link I posted:
http://www.motorcyclistonline.com/gearbox/motorcycle_helmet_review/index.html

They discuss most of this.

EVERY helmet that is sold in the U.S. HAS to have a DOT approval on it. It really means nothing other than it can be legally sold in the U.S.

Snell is another approval rating but doesn't exactly mean it will protect you any better.

In the link I posted they compared many different types of helmets from your top of the line RACE helmets that can cost a couple grand to the like $40 auto-parts store helmet. When it came to protecting your BRAIN, the $40 did just as good of a job and sometimes a better job. When you start paying more money for a helmet you are really paying for:
-looks
-comfort
-adjustability
-venting

Paying more money does NOT guarantee that your head/brain will be any safer.

Carbon (fiber) is a GREAT lightweight component, but there is a theory that carries a lot of weight: Carbon is no as good of a helmet material because it does not absorb energy but instead engergy passes through it. Simple physics will tell you that if the helmet doesn't absorb the energy, then it has to go somewhere. Where does it go? It transfers to the head and brain. Sure there is styrofoam in the helmet to absorb "most" of the energy but on a cheaper (poly) helmet the polyurethane actually does a good job of absorbing some of that engergy before it gets to the styrafoam. It is like comparing a rigid car that crashes and a car that has crumple zones. A modern crumple zone car absorbs the energy instead of passing it onto the passengers.

Hopefully that helps out. I am not saying Carbon-Fiber is bad exactly because having a lot of weight on your head during an accident can be very hard/fatal on your neck. There is not a lot of support in your neck, so you do want to keep the weight down. So it is clearly a balancing act.

 

[bdoe22]

Just read the link I posted:
http://www.motorcyclistonline.com/gearbox/motorcycle_helmet_review/index.html



EVERY helmet that is sold in the U.S. HAS to have a DOT approval on it. It really means nothing other than it can be legally sold in the U.S.

Snell is another approval rating but doesn't exactly mean it will protect you any better.

THIS IS TRUE BUT WHAT I FIND INTERESTING IS THAT THE MANUFACTURER CAN PLACE A DOT STICKER ON A HELMET IF "THEY" THINK THAT IT WILL PASS DOT TESTING......THAT DOES NOT MEAN THAT IT HAS ACTUALLY BEEN TESTED. THE ONLY WAY TO MAKE SURE THAT YOU ARE BUYING A HELMET THAT HAS BEEN THOROUGHLY TESTED IS TO BUY A SNELL APPROVED LID.

 

[XFIRE800]

I really like my 509 helmet

 

[milehighassassin]

THIS IS TRUE BUT WHAT I FIND INTERESTING IS THAT THE MANUFACTURER CAN PLACE A DOT STICKER ON A HELMET IF "THEY" THINK THAT IT WILL PASS DOT TESTING......THAT DOES NOT MEAN THAT IT HAS ACTUALLY BEEN TESTED. THE ONLY WAY TO MAKE SURE THAT YOU ARE BUYING A HELMET THAT HAS BEEN THOROUGHLY TESTED IS TO BUY A SNELL APPROVED LID.

That's not true, to have a DOT sticker you HAVE to undergo testing.

From my link:

Standardized Standards

To make buying a helmet in the U.S as confusing as possible, there are at least four standards a street motorcycle helmet can meet. The price of entry is the DOT standard, called FMVSS 218, that every street helmet sold here is legally required to pass. There is the European standard, called ECE 22-05, accepted by more than 50 countries. There's the BSI 6658 Type A standard from Britain. And lastly the Snell M2000/M2005 standard, a voluntary, private standard used primarily in the U.S. So every helmet for street use here must meet the DOT standard, and might or might not meet one of the others. Just by looking at the published requirements for each standard, you would guess a DOT-only helmet would be designed to be the softest, with an ECE helmet very close, then a BSI helmet, and then a Snell helmet.

Because there are few human volunteers for high-impact helmet testing—and because they would be a little confused after a hard day of 200-G impacts—it's done on a test rig.

The helmets are dropped, using gravity to accelerate the helmet to a given speed before it smashes onto a test anvil bolted to the floor. By varying the drop height and the weight of the magnesium headform inside the helmet, the energy level of the test can be easily varied and precisely repeated. As the helmet/headform falls it is guided by either a steel track or a pair of steel cables. That guiding system adds friction to slow the fall slightly, so the test technician corrects for this by raising the initial drop height accordingly.

The headform has an accelerometer inside that precisely records the force the headform receives, showing how many Gs the headform took as it stopped and for how long.

If you test a bunch of helmets under the same conditions, you can get a good idea of how well each one absorbs a particular hit. And it's important to understand that as in lap times, golf scores and marriages, a lower number is always better when we're talking about your head receiving extreme G forces.


All the Snell/DOT helmets we examined use a dual-density foam liner. The upper cap of foam on this Scorpion liner is softer to compensate for the extra stiffness of the spherical upper shell area. Some manufacturers, including Arai and HJC, use a one-piece liner with two different densities molded together.On The Highway To Snell

On the stiff, tough-guy side of this debate is the voluntary Snell M2000/M2005 standard, which dictates each helmet be able to withstand some tough, very high-energy impacts.

The Snell Memorial Foundation is a private, not-for-profit organization dedicated to "research, education, testing and development of helmet safety standards."

If you think moving quickly over the surface of the planet is fun and you enjoy using your brain, you should be grateful to the Snell Memorial Foundation. The SMF has helped create standards that have raised the bar in head protection in nearly every pursuit in which humans hit their heads: bicycles, horse riding, harness racing, karting, mopeds, skateboards, rollerblades, recreational skiing, ski racing, ATV riding, snowboarding, car racing and, of course, motorcycling.

But as helmet technology has improved and accident research has accumulated, many head-injury experts feel the Snell M2000 and M2005 standards are, to quote Dr. Harry Hurt of Hurt Report fame, "a little bit excessive."

The killer—the hardest Snell test for a motorcycle helmet to meet—is a two-strike test onto a hemispherical chunk of stainless steel about the size of an orange. The first hit is at an energy of 150 joules, which translates to dropping a 5-kilo weight about 10 feet—an extremely high-energy impact. The next hit, on the same spot, is set at 110 joules, or about an 8-foot drop. To pass, the helmet is not allowed to transmit more than 300 Gs to the headform in either hit.

Tough tests such as this have driven helmet development over the years. But do they have any practical application on the street, where a hit as hard as the hardest single Snell impact may only happen in 1 percent of actual accidents? And where an impact as severe as the two-drop hemi test happens just short of never?

Dr. Jim Newman, an actual rocket scientist and highly respected head-impact expert—he was once a Snell Foundation director—puts it this way: "If you want to create a realistic helmet standard, you don't go bashing helmets onto hemispherical steel balls. And you certainly don't do it twice.

"Over the last 30 years," continues Newman, "we've come to the realization that people falling off motorcycles hardly ever, ever hit their head in the same place twice. So we have helmets that are designed to withstand two hits at the same site. But in doing so, we have severely, severely compromised their ability to take one hit and absorb energy properly.

"The consequence is, when you have one hit at one site in an accident situation, two things happen: One, you don't fully utilize the energy-absorbing material that's available. And two, you generate higher G loading on the head than you need to. "What's happened to Snell over the years is that in order to make what's perceived as a better helmet, they kept raising the impact energy. What they should have been doing, in my view, is lowering the allowable G force.
"In my opinion, Snell should keep a 10-foot drop [in its testing]. But tell the manufacturers, 'OK, 300 Gs is not going to cut it anymore. Next year you're going to have to get down to 250. And the next year, 200. And the year after that, 185.'"



"The Snell sticker," continued Newman, "has become a marketing gimmick. By spending 60 cents [paid to the Snell foundation], a manufacturer puts that sticker in his helmet and he can increase the price by $30 or $40. Or even $60 or $100.

"Because there's this allure, this charisma, this image associated with a Snell sticker that says, 'Hey, this is a better helmet, and therefore must be worth a whole lot more money.' And in spite of the very best intentions of everybody at Snell, they did not have the field data [on actual accidents] that we have now [when they devised the standard]. And although that data has been around a long time, they have chosen, at this point, not to take it into consideration."



The Z1R ZRP-1 uses a soft, one-piece liner to soak up joule after joule of nasty impact energy.A World Of Hurt

Dr. Hurt sees the Snell standard in pretty much the same light.

"What should the [G] limit on helmets be? Just as helmet designs should be rounder, smoother and safer, they should also be softer, softer, softer. Because people are wearing these so-called high-performance helmets and are getting diffused [brain] injuries ... well, they're screwed up for life. Taking 300 Gs is not a safe thing.

"We've got people that we've replicated helmet [impacts] on that took 250, 230 Gs [in their accidents]. And they've got a diffuse injury they're not gonna get rid of. The helmet has a good whack on it, but so what? If they'd had a softer helmet they'd have been better off."

More on the link I posted...

We are lucky that we really don't have near as high of impacts as street riders do.

More on SNELL:

To Snell? Or Not To Snell?

In analyzing the accident-involved helmets, the Hurt researchers also addressed whether helmets certified to different standards actually performed differently in real crashes; that is, did a Snell-certified helmet work better at protecting a person in the real world than a plain old DOT-certified or equivalent helmet? The answer was no. In real street conditions, the DOT or equivalent helmets worked just as well as the Snell-certified helmets.[/B]

In the case of fatal accidents, there was one more important discovery in the Hurt Report: There were essentially no deaths to helmeted riders from head injuries alone. (that is very interesting!!)

Some people in the study, those involved in truly awful, bone-crushing, aorta-popping crashes, did sustain potentially fatal head injuries even though they were wearing helmets. The problem was that they also had, on average, three other injuries that would have killed them if the head injury hadn't.

In other words, a crash violent enough to overwhelm any decent helmet will usually destroy the rest of the body as well. Newman put this into perspective. "In most cases, bottoming [compressing a helmet's EPS completely] is not going to occur except in really violent accidents. And in these kind of cases, one might legitimately wonder whether there is anything you could do."

How many people were saved because their helmet was designed to a "higher" or "higher energy" standard than the DOT standard? As far as the Hurt researchers could ascertain, none.

But the Hurt Report was done nearly 25 years ago. There have been a couple of significant accident studies done since. Both of which, by our reading, tend to back up the Hurt Report's findings.

The COST 327 study investigated 253 motorcycle accidents in Finland, Germany and the United Kingdom, from '95-'98. Of these, the investigators selected 20 well-documented crashes and replicated the impact from those crashes by doing drop tests on identical helmets in the lab until they got the same helmet damage. This allowed them to find out how hard the helmet in the accident had been hit, and to correlate the impact with the injuries actually suffered by the rider or passenger. The COST 327 results showed that some very serious and potentially fatal head injuries can occur at impact levels that stiffer current helmet standards—such as Snell M2000 and M2005—allow helmets to exceed.

And remember, these guys are investigating crashes in Europe, where Snell-rated helmets are a rarity because they can't generally pass the softer ECE standard required there.

In other words, the latest relevant study, which used state-of-the-art methods and covered accidents in countries where there are plenty of 10-second, 160-mph superbikes running around, concluded that current standards—even the relatively soft ECE standards—are allowing riders' heads to be routinely subjected to forces that can severely injure or kill them. The COST study estimated that better, more energy-absorbent helmets could reduce motorcycle fatalities up to 20 percent. If that estimate is legitimate and was applied in the U.S., it would mean saving about 700 American riders' lives a year.

There's no good reason to think things are different here in the States than in Germany, Britain and Finland, all modern, well-developed, superbike-rich countries. Heads are heads, asphalt is asphalt, and falling bodies operate under the same laws of physics there as they do here in America.

If you ask most head-impact scientists or the representatives of the European helmet manufacturers how they like the Snell M2000/M2005 standard, they will generally tell you it's unrealistic, based more on supposition than on science, and forces manufacturers to make helmets that are stiffer than they should be.

If you ask the representatives of many of the top Snell-approved helmet companies, they'll say the Snell standard is a wonderful thing, and they'll imply helmets certified to lower-energy standards—that would be any other standard in the world—are suspicious objects, like smoked clams from the 99 Cents Only store. And not as good at protecting you in an extremely high-energy mega-crash as a Snell-approved helmet is.

What the Snell advocates won't tell you is that when these same makers sell their helmets in Europe, Japan and the U.K., they are not the same helmets they sell here, and they're not Snell rated. They are built softer, tailored to conform to exactly the same ECE or BSI standards as the European makers.

If you get these two groups of folks in a room together and ask these questions, we'd suggest wearing a helmet yourself.

 

[ROZZY MX]

fox

 

[Watts24x]

check out 509 new helmets they are sick!!

 

[03rmking]

check out 509 new helmets they are sick!!

Here are photos of the new 509 Argyle helmet color ways for 2011...

 

[FJTORT2]

i like my klim f4... seems to be a good bang for the buck!

 

[Gibsons]

i like my klim f4... seems to be a good bang for the buck!

LOL. good bang for the buck. i don't know what your smoking but I'll buy a pound. What are they like 3-$400.00, and probably the most uncomfortable lid I've ever tried. paying a lot of money for that name. IMO.

 

[backcountryislife]

Of the sled helmets I've tried, the 509 is comfy, light (not as light as a DH helmet by any means) and seems well built, the only issue imo, it isn't vented NEARLY enough for me.
The klim was more money, not lighter that I could tell (also way heavier than my DH helmets), fit my head well, but was less comfy in general than the 509. Also not enough venting imo.