in message <[email hidden]>, Tony Raven
(') said:Simon Brooke said:in message <[email hidden]>, ctz
(') said:
(Does anybody wear a helmet with chin protector? Would you recommend
it?)I wear one of these
<URL:http://www.chainreactioncycles.com/Models.aspx?ModelID=2407>, as
do a number of other people in my club. However, I've never worn it
(or any other helmet) for a road journey, and I don't usually wear it
off road unless I'm intending to do something silly.I've no idea how much difference the chin protector would make in
practice, although in a simple fall I think it would be effective.
It's not very much heavier than a helmet without, but you do look
slightly more wierd than the average cyclist and the wind noise around
your ears is quite high.But IMHO if you're going to wear a helmet at all it might as well
protect your face, since that tends to be the bit of the head that
takes damage in falls from bikes.There is evidence from the motorbike world though that a chin bar
prevents injury to the chin at the expense of transferring the energy
to
the neck and creating spinal hyperextension. I would rather ask the
doctor to repair a broken chin than a broken neck.
Yeah. We're talking about two quite different engineering structures
here, however; one is a very solid piece of laminated composite integral
with the equally solid helmet, and the other is a thin piece of
(apparently) press-moulded ABS with some foam on the inside, held onto
the equally flimsy helmet by four bolts.
There's no way it's strong enough to transfer enough force to break your
neck. I don't believe it's strong enough to protect you from a broken
chin, any more than the rest of the helmet is going to do much about a
broken skull. What it may protect you from, however, like the rest of
the helmet, is gouges, scrapes and scratches, which on the face can
leave unsightly scarring.
While I agree that far more research is needed on cycle helmet safety and
that the outcomes of such research are often counter-intuitive, on the
whole I think a chin guard of this sort is /probably/ a good thing, for
journeys where any helmet is merited at all. For example, I think it
would have protected the OP from finding 'a rather large chunk of flesh
hanging from my chin', but I question whether that would have been worth
the hassle of wearing the bloody thing every ride for eight years.
It's a judgement call, of course, and I'm certainly not trying to
persuade anyone else to wear one. It might help, but, as you say,
equally it might not.
--
[email hidden] (Simon Brooke) http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/
;; making jokes about dyslexia isn't big, it isn't clever and
;; it isn't furry.