Helmet Reviews & Riding Gear Expertise
Buy a cheap plastic bucket and you get exactly that: a cheap plastic bucket. Buy a well-engineered injected polycarbonate helmet, though, and you get something that punches well above its price tag — a shell that’s been melted, shot into a steel mould under several tonnes of pressure, cooled, and turned into the single most … Read more
Here’s a confession every biker eventually makes, usually somewhere around their third or fourth helmet: the eye-wateringly expensive lid isn’t always the one that ends up on the shelf getting the most miles. A cheap polycarbonate helmet under £100 is not a compromise you’re grudgingly accepting — it’s often the sensible, well-engineered choice that thousands … Read more
Six hours into a wet Tuesday on the A9, your neck will tell you exactly what your helmet is made of. That’s the honest truth about buying a multi-fibre helmet for touring — it’s not really a purchase you make with your eyes, it’s one you make with your neck, your ears, and the top … Read more
Stand in any decent bike shop and pick up two helmets that look almost identical, and you’ll notice something odd: one feels like a bag of sugar, the other like a bag of flour. Same size, wildly different heft. That difference usually comes down to one argument that rumbles on in every forum thread and … Read more
Buy a Kevlar motorcycle helmet and you’re not really buying a fabric — you’re buying a promise. The promise that when a lorry driver doesn’t check their mirror, or the diesel patch under the roundabout finally claims a victim, the thing wrapped around your skull was engineered to argue with the tarmac on your behalf. … Read more
Stand two helmets side by side on a shop shelf and, honestly, you probably couldn’t tell which one costs £150 and which costs £450. That’s the trap. A fibreglass helmet vs polycarbonate helmet decision isn’t about which one looks tougher — it’s about what’s happening inside that shell the split second it hits tarmac, and … Read more
Six hours into a Cornwall-to-Cairngorms slog, your helmet stops being a piece of kit and starts being a roommate. A good one disappears. A bad one reminds you, every single mile, that it exists — through a whistling vent, a visor that won’t stop misting, or a dull ache creeping across your temples somewhere around … Read more
Try this experiment next time you’re in a bike shop: pick up a cheap polycarbonate lid with one hand, then pick up a fibreglass one with the other. The difference is subtle, but it’s there — a sort of density that tells you the shell is doing more work with less material. That’s the whole … Read more
There’s a specific kind of quiet that settles over a long motorway stretch once you’ve found a genuinely good touring lid — no buffeting, no rattle, just the low thrum of the engine and, if you’ve fitted the right kit, a podcast or a mate’s voice coming through crystal clear. That’s the promise of a … Read more
Somewhere around mile 150 of a motorway slog, most riders stop thinking about horsepower and start thinking about their neck. A fibreglass touring helmet is a helmet with a glass-fibre or glass-fibre composite outer shell, valued for combining a lighter weight than polycarbonate with a more forgiving, energy-spreading way of absorbing an impact. That’s the … Read more