I buy a new helmet every year. Like to change up the look.
Shelf life for a helmet...
- Thread starter Over_Easy
- Start date
bigoltool
Registered
Most of the foam in your helmet (and almost everywhere else these days) is a Polyurethane material. This foam that makes your helmet fit nice and snug when new takes a compression set over time and eventually will fail to return to its original uncompressed height. Foam also suffers from Flex fatigue. This means that as it gets flexed repeatedly over it's lifecycle it softens. This can all be characterized as Hysteresis loss. The Helmet manufacturers’ have most likely calculated that after a certain number of hours of use the helmet can no longer fit the user as it did when new and as you know the fit of the helmet is the probably the single most crucial factor to it's relative survivability in a crash. This in addition to the aging and degradation of the expanded polystyrene inner core and degradation of the laminate in the shell itself are more than ample grounds to replace a lid after 5 years.
i would be more concerned about the foam then the fiberglass. if you take care of a fiberglass boat it well last well over 10 years and that with the abuse of the water and sun. we just sold a boat that was 22 years old and looked mint.gents?...fiberglass and the resins that bind that glass degrade over time..take a walk around yer local marina...check out some old fiberglass boat hulls...then ask yourself if a helmet has a "shelf life"...and the term really isn't "shelf life" as that would indicate that it's not being used...or exposed to gallons of salinated sweat and the elements...the term should be "Use Life".
The resins utilize "catalysts"...and anything that incorporates "catalysts"?..can only be "Stable" for a finite period of time and sooner or later?..it begins to break down and degrade...as does the protection it affords your head.
L8R, Bill.
What Jinkster said. Almost verbatim to what the Arai rep explained to me in Daytona last Oct.
Might as well add my $.02
Look inside your helmet and you'll see an orange sticker that says SNELL-xx where xx is either 90, 95, 2000 or 2005.
That sticker confirms your helmet conforms to the SNELL standards for the year of the number. They come out with new standards every 5 years.
If a helmet doesn't have the SNELL sticker, I'm not buying it.
It's gonna suck when my current helmet expires. I hope they still make the blue/silver Busa helmet cause I kinda like it.
Look inside your helmet and you'll see an orange sticker that says SNELL-xx where xx is either 90, 95, 2000 or 2005.
That sticker confirms your helmet conforms to the SNELL standards for the year of the number. They come out with new standards every 5 years.
If a helmet doesn't have the SNELL sticker, I'm not buying it.
It's gonna suck when my current helmet expires. I hope they still make the blue/silver Busa helmet cause I kinda like it.
RedBull
Registered
Not bad-only a 13yr old thread....you've resurrected older ones.....
5 yrs is the consensus on when to change helmets.
On the track at tech inspections they check the date of manufacture. Longer than 5 years and you don't ride.
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