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Helmets

Helmets: Of all protective gear you can possibly put on yourself, a good helmet should be your first choice. Most bones in your body heal over time, but few people recover from skull damage.



Some BASE jumpers take their skydiving helmet into the BASE world, thinking that if it worked for one parachuting sport, it must work for the other. However, skydiving helmets are mostly for bumping your head in the plane and mid-air collisions. BASE helmets are for banging your head against the objects, the boulders on the ground or the tree branches you land amidst.
That said, some people decide to wear their skydiving helmet, some other lightweight helmet, or no helmet at all. It is important that the jumper is aware of the protection offered by different helmet styles, and comfortable with the associated risks.

Protection: Helmet science

Obviously the first thing you consider when buying a helmet is the protection it offers. To know what to look for, one has to understand how helmets work. There is a lot of useful information on the Snell Memorial Foundation website, which is a non-profit organization that independently tests available helmets. Especially their section of technical articles has some useful information.
The purpose of a good helmet is to absorb as much impact energy as possible before it gets to you, and to spread the remainder over as much surface as possible. There are three basic mechanisms by which a helmet does this…
1. Breaking strength. The shell of the helmet is designed to break when hit sufficiently hard. Breaking the shell takes energy — energy that can no longer be used to break more important things. The shell on a good helmet will consume a lot of energy before it breaks, meaning it is neither brittle nor particularly soft.
2. Distribution of energy. The shell and liner of the helmet act to distribute the force and energy of the impact. They take an impact that would have hit just one spot on your head and distribute that energy over as much of your skull as possible. A BASE helmet must fit snugly, or the energy won’t be distributed at all.
3. Liner crush. The liner of a good helmet should be designed to absorb a great deal of energy through crushing on impact. This is a delicate balance — too soft, and it won’t absorb any energy; too hard, and it won’t crush before you do. An excellent BASE helmet will have the same sort of hard foam liner that you would find in a motorcycle helmet.
Always consider all three elements when purchasing a helmet. Don’t think a helmet is great because it is made from a material that is harder than diamond. If the liner isn’t well made, the energy will travel straight through the shell and still damage your head. Conversely, if all you have is a flimsy shell with the softest liner, no energy is distributed over the surface of the shell meaning your liner still has to absorb most of the impact.

Most of the time you get what you pay for. DOT and Snell provide guidelines and independent testing, but most of it is focused on motorcycle helmets, which are rarely suitable for BASE. Beyond motorcycle helmets, very little information is published on tension models.

Peripheral Vision and Maneuverability

Make sure your helmet does not limit your peripheral vision. You want to be able to see from the corner of your eyes. This also ties into maneuverability. When you look over your shoulder, can you see far behind you? When you look up, can you see your canopy? If you wear a full face helmet, does the jaw protector touch your chest? If you land in the water, is it going to be awkward to swim with it?

Fit

A good fit for your helmet is very important. People will tell you it should fit snug and comfortable. This doesn’t really tell you much though. How about this; when you shift the helmet forward and backward, the skin on your forehead should shift along with it. You should be unable to rotate it from side to side.
Consider that in BASE jumping you will rarely wear the helmet for long periods of time. This means that you might decide to error on the side of too snug, because it is unlikely to give you a headache.

Weight

Weight is an important issue in BASE because of the harder openings compared to skydiving. The opening shock of a deep slider down jump can exert a significant force on your spine and neck that is exaggerated by all extra weight a helmet puts on your head. It is not uncommon for BASE jumpers to develop a chronic neck pain after doing many slider down jumps on a heavy helmet with top mount camera setup.

Also consider the weight in relation to how much gear you have to carry when climbing an object or hiking to an exit point. Some cliffs can involve long strenuous hikes and every pound you add to your gear is going to cost a lot of extra energy.

Size

Size affects your maneuverability (as explained above), but it also affects the size of your gear when carrying it to an object. Some gear bags barely fit a rig and when you put a helmet in as well, it can stick out at the top. This presents a disadvantage on sites where you don’t want to be recognized as a BASE jumper and prefer to look like some random person with a backpack.

Aerodynamics

When you start doing Terminal jumps involving tracking or [Wingsuit Base]], you might consider the aerodynamics of your helmet. Intermediate to expert trackers will find that certain types of helmets add a significant amount of drag.

Camera Mount-ability

While the first concern for a helmet should be the protection it offers, many BASE jumpers like to mount a camera to their helmet at some point in their BASE career. Think whether you want to side-mount or top-mount, and take the extra weight of the camera in account. More information on cameras, mounting and potential issues, can be found on the Cameras page.

Sound

If the helmet covers your ears, you might not be able to hear as well. On low profile jumps where you are whispering, this might be a problem. Conversely, your helmet might block the wind noise on terminal jumps, which can be an advantage.

Options

Given all the above constraints and trade-offs, finding a good helmet is hard. There are four major options with different benefits and drawbacks.
  1. Skydiving helmets; fashionable, you probably already have one, expensive, offer little to no protection. Nearly all skydiving helmets are only fashionable, and provide no protection against hard impacts.
  2. Mountain bike helmets; full face, great protection, can be lightweight, some models don’t sacrifice peripheral vision. Large, hard to mount a camera, not very aerodynamic.
  3. Skateboarding or snowboarding helmets; good trade-off between skydiving and mountain bike helmets. Lighter, not full face, better protection than skydiving helmets, but not as good as mountain bike helmets.
  4. Paragliding helmets; similar to skydiving helmets in terms of protection, but offers superior aerodynamics and great peripheral vision.
Quote Originally Posted by ChadPeabody
Chad Peabody wrote: Ya know, one night I did a solo from a really huge, really sexy, green bridge in California.
My landing was, let’s say, less than graceful and I planted my face directly in the ground. I sniffed and sniffed to keep the blood from dripping out of my nose and onto my gear while I crammed it into my stash bag.
I could feel little bits of hard grit in my mouth and I moved them around with my tongue. They felt like tooth fragments. I spit them into my hand but I didn’t have a light to look at them to see what they were. I didn’t want to lose them because they felt like they might be important.
I held the bits in my hand until I got to my car where I could turn on the dome light and see that they were pieces of gravel that I must have eaten when I drove my skull into the road.
I like full face helmets. I wonder why…
Quote Originally Posted by JaapSuter
Opinion of Jaap Suter: I wear a full face mountain bike helmet. I have used several different brands and all worked satisfactory. Right now I jump a Sixsixone helmet that is lightweight, fits snug, protrudes forward very little and offers great peripheral vision. I don’t jump with a camera, but I think mounting a small top mount camera is possible.

Helmets

I would like to detail out various helmet options available on the market today.

Protech

Bone Head

Gath Sports

Sky Systems N-Vertigo

[please add more]

http://www.ZZZ.com




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