CrowSeph

hello riders.
One week ago i had a brutal crash , and since that day i'm thinking a lot...
I was thinking about buyng an helmet with the peak , but mostly have a removible peak.
Are those helmet usefull or useless? i mean if the peak were rigid i can understand the helmet to be more resistant and protective at least for the face. But those thin foil plastic peaks do not make me feel secure , i think in a bad crash that plastic piece can be just destroyed , hoping that piece itself do not shatter at all.
What do you guys think?

Darth Lefty 

Are you all right? What happened?

The bill is to keep the sun out of your eyes, not the ground out of your face. They are sometimes made to pop off so they don't break when you drop your helmet. If you want full face protection you get a full face helmet (e.g. Bell Sanction) and goggles.

CrowSeph

I can't remember anything. But as my friends said i crashed in the turn during a road downhill... I broken my cheekbone and my finger. I just hope to recovery the sensibility of my face or at least my upper lip. I'll open a new tread telling how the crash is happened and how important is the helmet.

Basically buying an helmet for the peak is a waste of time. Because do not give furthermore protection.
And since i do cross country and trail riding one helmet for both road and MTB seems enough. The idea of a full helmet is good but for those disciplines seems a bit too much.
Have a good day

Darth Lefty 

Pretty sure it's mostly about ventilation and weight. In motorcycling, the go-fast crowd wears slick full face helmets with tilt-up visors, dirt bikers wear full helmets with big chin bars and goggles, and half helmets are for the guys dressed like pirates loitering on WW2-style bikes.* But in cycling the go-fast crowd is sweating buckets and saving grams, and the MTB'ers only get out the full helmets when they feel in a lot of danger.

The bill on my current MTB helmet snapped off some time ago. It was not made to. I have not bothered fixing it, but if I did I'd use some Velcro dots.

I don't know why dirt helmets have such big chin bars. I'll have to go look that up... ok, it's for more ventilation and so mud and dirt can fall through and not build up





* (broad generalization in a helmet-law state.)

Calsun

There are three levels of head protection provided by the different types of helmets from Fox Racing for mountain bikers. There are the standard MTB helmets with a visor, the Speedframe Pro that provide more protection for the rear of the skull, and the Proframe helmets that provide the most protection and are designed for use by downhill racers and these provide as much face protection as is practical for the rider.

I have the Speedframe Pro and it is every bit as comfortable as my road helmets. When helmets with MIPS technology emerged I bought new helmets that had this feature which was a no-brainer decision to make. Not spending an additional $135 to have the best possible protection for my head makes no sense at all. Of course when California enacted its mandatory helmet law the transplant surgeons lost a great source of organ donors so there are downsides.