Well i crashed on my coker aobut 5 days ago, i was fine just a little scraped up, well today i looked at my helment and noticed what i actuly did to it in the crash…
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oooh, impressive! now imagine that’s your head in the picture because you weren’t wearing a helmet… any questions?
sorry i spelt helmet wrong, my mom wanted me to ge the comp
Let’s be realistic; a helmet sticks out way further in back than your head does, and it raises the rotational center of gravity while adding weight. So the fact that you hit your helmet, especially on the back point like that, is not at all proof that you would have hit your head were you not wearing a helmet.
Nasty roadrash story! Helmet saved life moral. Elite credintials. Personal attack.
fine, go ahead, don’t wear a helmet, have a nasty crash without one, get knocked unconcious, become a vegetable for the rest of your life, 'snot my problem.
…and it is safer to not wear seat belts, because you will be thrown safetly from the crash, instead of being trapped inside the vehicle.
Tom is not stupid, and is not a fool on a crusade against helmets. There’s no need to go making sarcastic attacks on his statement. All he is doing is being realistic. The damage to a helmet is not equal or directly comparable to that of an unguarded head in the same crash. As far as I can tell, that is all he is saying.
And technically, assuming you didn’t have a windshield, being without a seatbelt can be better, since you could end up flying into a pool of water or sand rather than having a hard piece of cloth crush your collarbone (you run into a low brick wall at the edge of a harbor, for example).
I’ve been on cycling newsgroups too long to be interested in getting into helmet wars. All I am saying is that it is an obvious physical fact that you’re more likely to hit your helmet than you are to hit your unprotected head, therefore the fact that someone hit his helmet in a crash doesn’t mean that he would have hit his head.
I don’t believe that Tom is stupid. Show the picture of the helmet to a bunch of people and some will believe that it saved the riders life or spared him from head injuries. Others will say that it is inconclusive because the helmet is much larger than ones head and will cause more damage to the riders neck because it extends outward and will cause neck trauma.
Some of these same people also believe that seat belts are dangerous because of the small chance that you would get hurt in a side impact crash or you would be trapped if you landed in the water. It doesn’t matter that wearing a seat belt saves many more lives than they take.
even if he wouldn’t have hit is head it saved his neck from whiplash. There were three options, helmet - no damage, no helmet - neck absorbs shock but saves head (still hurts), no helmet - head expodes. The two no helmet options don’t sound like fun to me.
Compared with the size and mass of the human body, the helmet is indeed negligible in both terms. An engineer would have no problem saying that if you smash your helmet, you would have smashed your head.
The issue isn’t the size and mass of the human body, it’s the size and mass of the human head. A helmet adds about 10% to the weight of your head, and raises the center of gravity relative to the pivot point (your neck), while increasing the diameter by 5-10cm. Any engineer who tells you those facts don’t increase the chance of an impact in a fall is trying to sell you something.
Note that I’m not saying such impacts are inherently a bad thing; they will almost certainly be in the range of impacts a helmet can actually protect against. I am, once again, merely pointing out that a helmet impact would not necessarily have been a head impact.
even if it wouldn’t ‘necessarily’ have been a head impact, i bet evan is glad that he didn’t take the chance!!!
being able to show off helmet damage is much cooler than being able to show off head damage 
Well judging by how hard i hit, and how much dammage there was to the helmet i would guess if i hadnt been wearing it i would be getting coloring books for christmas for the rest of my life.
haha yeah if you were lucky like that maybe you would fair off better.
Helmit is so better then not though I do bet that your more likely to take a hit/slightly harder hit with one on. There’s still that wiplash efect though that you cant really stop when you fall sometimes. It just doesnt matter what youre wairing you take a hit. The Mythbusters should do a segmint on this.
Let’s face it. There are just too few candidates for the Darwin awards lately.
So if anyone doesn’t want to wear a helmet, I say fine. Let 'em wear a ziplock baggy full of pudding if they want. Or not.
In either case, it will be all in good clean fun when we pass the entertaining story of their death around via email next year.
Thanks in advance for the laugh.
BTW, can I have some of your stuff? Your Uni? Or maybe the unused helmet? Any unopened pudding at least?
What I want to know is why he only noticed the helmet damage five days after the crash…
Check out this pic…this could be that dude’s skull
