Priller
Well-known member
I'm pretty sure it does, actually. Just because things don't decompose, it doesn't mean they are static. Ask anyone who has discovered the armour in their jacket has turned to crumbly bits. I've done repair work on buildings with old EPS boards, and they are often brittle and easily cracked.
In the case of helmets, you don't want them to be tanks. You want them to be pillows. The vast majority of head injuries involve impact, not piercing. Because of that, the name of the game is making the deceleration as gentle as possible, which involves helmets that compress and deform in a controllable way. This is also why it's so important to have the liner do its job as designed, and why degraded foam affects safety. If it gets brittle or too rigid, it no longer performs as designed.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure manufacturers err very much on the side of caution when deciding recommended replacement intervals. But the reasons for that are more complex than them just wanting to sell more helmets (though I'm sure that's also a factor). There's also liability, combined with the variables about how and where people use and store their helmets. UV, temperature changes, humidity and abuse all play a part. Will a 10-yearold helmet do its job? Probably, if it was stored in a cool, dry and dark place and only used for a part of the year or for an occasional Sunday ride. Probably not, if it was used a lot, especially somewhere hot or humid, or stored in an unheated garage or regularly left in the sun, etc.
As for Chinese helmets, or any other Chinese-made product, there's two factors for me. First is the geopolitical and human rights element, which I won't get into here except to say that in my opinion the Chinese government has become much less benign over the past five years.
The second factor is the brand on the helmet. Lots of companies like Scorpion and LS2 sell decent helmets made in China, but because they are beholden to European and American safety and import standards, they have a lot of incentive to ensure their products meet a range of basic standards and QA/QC elements. They also have to abide by intellectual property laws etc. The Alibaba specials have zero accountability, and so may be decent or may be life-threateningly awful. Sometimes the only way to find out is to crash, and that's not the point where I want to discover they'd made a fundamental design or manufacturing error.
Similar to the off-brand Pakistani or Bangladeshi suits, often these flaws can't be identified just by looking at them. One of the biggest wastes of money I ever bought was a 'custom' suit from a reseller in Vancouver. Made to measure for less than a low end Alpinestars seemed to be a no-brainer, but when I got it, the forearms were uncomfortably snug. I wore it anyway, thinking the leather might stretch, but not long after, the seams started to split. I'd since moved to Ontario, so return/repair options weren't worth pursuing, but if I'd crashed in that suit, it could easily have come apart without warning. (I should say that not all affordable custom suits are bad, as I've heard nothing but good about Plus, popular with the KW and SOAR riders).
I guess to summarise, to me there's a middle ground between the $50 Alibaba knock-off and the $3000 AGV Rossi rep. I prefer to buy things from companies that have a good reputation and have incentive to maintain it, and when safety is involved, I'll spend extra for that peace of mind. I'm not buying brake rotors from Alibaba, that's for sure.
