thook

i wear a bell......taco bell...on my shirt...on occasion

jesting aside, i'd never worn a helmet until the last 5 or so years. and, it's funny, i'd never hit my head in a wreck until i started wearing one. even when i rode skateboards and bmx i never hit my head. past life ninja skills? enough sprained ankles and wrists, bloody elbows and legs, though

repechage

Ziggurat was a made for Criterium course, one sprinter's hill, wide nice pavement.
Those look like intermediate or Junior ratios.
I think the first race there was 1972 or 1973, it ran for a while, then did not allow racing there for a time.
Building was originally for North American Rockwell.

Erzulis Boat 

I was more concerned about "Stretch" dragging the rear brake and sandbagging the sprint!

bikingshearer 

I dis some very, very low-grade racing from 1973 to about 1976, so I picked up the hairnet habit then. (Our take on the open casket old saw was that they were for easy identification.)

!975 - I did my first-ever loaded tour from the Bay Are to near Eureka. I was on my way home (wearing my hairnet) and got run off of US 101 by an 18-wheeler near Laytonville. (I don't think it was intentional, but the result was the same.) I cyclo-crossed on the shoulder until I hit a large rock and taoced my front wheel. When I got up and stopped screaming at the disappearing truck, I looked around at all the sharp, pointy rocks and realized the by all rights at least one of them should have been embedded in my skull.

When I got home, I bought a Bell Biker. They weren't even available in stores ; I had to mail-order it. Since then, I can count the number of times I have ridden without a helmet on the fingers of one hand, probably with one or two left over. Riding without a helmet? Not for me.

The Bikers shown in this thread were the new and improved version 2. I had one of the very, very first version 1 types. The differences? Mine had white straps, not red (and boy, did they ever get grungy). The straps were attached at the front with a rivet or some such (perfectly aimed at your temples), not a double-folded strap. And mine had a rear center vent hole that the version 2 models did not have. I wore it for years, including on my 1980 unsupported tour from Livermore CA (where I grew up and my parents lived) to Washington DC (where two aunts lived).

Oh, the video shows the Bell Biker without any of the velcroed-in foam "sizing pads" that made it snug and reasonably comfortable. Those pads also soaked up sweat - until they didn't and all the sweat ran down your head and face. They came in different thicknesses so you could customize the fit. Without those pads, the thing would have been unwearable.

Here's an amazingly grainy photo of me riding up the south side of Mt. Lassen early in that 1980 cross-country trip (this is about 8 generations worth of scans, print out, and rescans - I can't find the original, which is much sharper). Yes, that's that Bell Biker on my pumpkin head.

thook

i ran across an 80's Giro hat complete with it's blue and white net at the thrift store, yesterday. they only wanted $5 for it. i passed on it as it wouldn't have fit my pumpkin head, anyway. besides, i already have a nutcase. it makes me look marvin the martian

gaucho777 

Yes, junior gears. I still have the freewheel (link). Back when 50x15 was needed for rollout, and more than 39x21 meant you'd be dropped.

rwh 

I broke two helmets in the 80s, both times my head was inside of it. One I am sure would have been called a concussion today but back then we just rubbed dirt on it and walked it off. I hate to think what would have happened without those helmets. Probably would have ended up an organ doner.

Chombi1 

My family all rode motorcycles, so we were used to wearing hard shell helmets when we rode on two wheels. In the 80's I used a Bell Tourlite helmet, then switched over to the Giro-like expanded foam, lycra covered helmet by Avenir, in the mid and later 80's..... Fortunately, I never really had to test the helmets except for one high speed lowside crash with my Avenir, but my head never hit the deck in that fall....
I did consider wearing a leather hairnet in the early 80's, like the pros wore back then, but I was well aware of how much of a joke they were when it came to protection,................and frankly, I thought I'd look uber dorky wearing one.........

oldbobcat

Vetta made a cool helmet. The first guy in our lunch ride group to wear a hardshell wore a Vetta. He was also the first to ride 700c clinchers.

oldbobcat

Nobody in my club wore helmets, starting in the early 1970s, except when we raced, or maybe for training in the rain. And then it was only hairnet strap helmets. We'd joke that the riders with hardshells rode as if they intended to use them. One of our local shops got a bunch of wool speedskating caps one year, so that became our preferred winter headgear. They had a sort of widow's peak browline and they came to a point in the back.

I started wearing my first hardshell lid in 1993 when I became an expectant dad. My wife insisted. It was some sort of Bell that fit reasonably well and looked a bit like an inflated hairnet, my style. Speaking of that, I once got about six miles down the road before I noticed I put it on backwards. These days the kid is on her own and I might sneak out of the house lidless, just to feel the wind in my hair, for a short ride. Or I'll wear my speedskating cap for old times sake. I only hit my head once, in a training race, wearing a hairnet. There may have been a small concussion, but I was able to drive home.and ride the next day.

oldbobcat

The right way and the wrong way to wear a hardshell.

gaucho777 

@DiabloScott Nice gams.

canklecat

I tried a hairnet in the 1970s but it was a cheap vinyl one that fell apart after about a year, and probably didn't do any good anyway.

After that I tried a helmet similar to the Branchale, but it was too hot most of the time in Southern California.

Usually I went sans helmet back then. When I resumed cycling in 2015 the second thing I bought, after the bike, was a helmet. Since then I might have ridden without a helmet once -- when I rode 5 miles to REI to replace a helmet that was damaged when I was hit by a car that year.

gios

I didn't start road riding until the early 90s and got my first two helmets.

Trakhak

Got a leather strap helmet, a.k.a. "hairnet," for my first ABLA-licensed bike race in 1964. Graduated to a Bell Biker when they first came out, about 12 years later, after reading Bicycling! magazine's first comprehensive helmet review, in which they described the results of tests of the helmets then available.

The Bell Biker and the MSR mountaineering helmets were the only ones that passed the tests. The testing agency refused to test the leather strap helmets for fear of damaging the test equipment and tested the Skid-Lid at one-quarter the drop height used for the better helmets. Even then, the Skid-Lid failed to meet the minimum standard of energy absorption.

People who claim that they don't need a helmet, that "all you need is to know how to fall," are delusional. I've crashed many times over the last 55 years or so of riding bikes at high speed, in or out of competition. Most of the time I manage to roll more or less gracefully and keep from hitting my head. Then there were the times that I, e.g., hit an unnoticeable wheel-shaped pothole while reaching into a back pocket or started a downhill turn on a paved trail, just as my front wheel reached what turned out to be not just a shadow but also a patch of wet moss.

John E

I started wearing an old-school padded "hairnet" ca. 1969, graduated to a super-padded Kucherik "hairnet" in 1972, and switched to a Bell Biker hard shell in late 1976, after my one-and-only crash with a motor vehicle (left cross). I have worn some sort of hard shell helmet ever since, most recently a Giro XEN, because it fits the shape of my head so well.

VtwinVince

I didn't start wearing a helmet until 1992 (still have that one). A helmet saved my life in 2001 when I t-boned a pickup at high speed who ran a stop sign.

repechage

the statement regarding racing gears in the pre 39t era, as everyone rode 42 small ring, even though Shimano provided for smaller-

if you need a cog larger than a 21, you are off the back anyway.

This was the SoCal view, there really were not many true road races with significant climbs.

DiabloScott

I still got it! (The gams, not the V1-Pro or the Vetta)

2wheeljonz 

I started wearing one (Bell Biker) back in the mid 70’s when I commuted to dental school in San Francisco. I also wore gloves. My reasoning was that the two things I needed to practice my chosen profession were my head and hands.
Fortunately, in nearly 50 years of riding my only damaging accident was to my shoulder when crashing on a downhill ride at Sundance ski resort one summer.
Like someone wrote previously, I can count on probably one hand the times I have ridden without a helmet.

Prostyler

I had bmx helmets , but not mtb/ road.
I don't remember seeing them.

philbob57

An almost crash around 1978 got me to buy a helmet. I was flying down a hill in suburban DC, with right-of-way and no stop sign, and a woman in station wagon stopped at her stop sign, looked at me, and pulled out slowly. I went down to avoid hitting her. Got some road rash, which is probably was less pain than if I had hit her. She went blithely on her way. I still get angry when I think of her. haven't ridden without a helmet since then.

Russ Roth

Didn't get my first helmet till 90 when I wanted to do an MS150 ride and they required it, was 14 at the time. Despite my mom being an EMT for a fairly busy suburb of Syracuse area my parents couldn't be bothered to buy me one previously and I didn't know they were a thing till required. Did that ride and my first race that year which also required a helmet. Been so used to not having one that I didn't bother wearing it most days since no one else I knew even owned a helmet at the time. Was a Bell foam helmet with a lycra and mesh cover. Few years later I outgrew it, it was starting to crack anyways, and go a new bell that had the plastic cover bonded to the foam which was the new technology for the year. Used that one for another 6 or so years till the shop I was at had me replace it in order to race for them.

ascherer 

I was doored hard in '73 or so. Good thing I was a kid, a mild concussion and all-over sprains was the worst of it but mom insisted I get a helmet. Leather was the only game in town, the early plastics were too funky, some folks modded hockey helmets for cycling. I got a Bell Biker when they came out and used it on tours but the airflow was non-existent. V1 Pro was far better, but through much of the 80's I didn't bother with helmets on group rides. Eventually I got old enough to value my skull enough to wear helmets consistently.

drlogik 

MY first helmet was a Vetta as has been pictured except mine was red. That was back in, oh, 1987-ish, maybe? I wore a bike hat before that. I'm annal about riding with a helmet now, gloves and a Take-a-Look mirror.