You are reading a single comment by @NurseHolliday and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
London Fixed Gear and Single-Speed is a community of predominantly fixed gear and single-speed cyclists in and around London, UK.
This site is supported almost exclusively by donations. Please consider donating a small amount regularly.
@NurseHolliday
How about you two stop sucking your dad's dicks and actually have a think about what I was trying to say. If you look at the average material used for a bike helmet, the UTS is around 50 MPa, the UTS of bone is well over 100 MPa. So the material that a helmet is made of will yield before bone will. You look at a shattered or smashed helmet and think, fuck that could have been my skull, but no, your skull would have withstood almost double the stress before yielding.
Of course Stress is F/A so a helmet is able to take a larger force than it's low UTS would suggest before yielding because it's spreading it over a wider area than your head.
My whole point about crumple zones was that if you have an accident in an older car, the car looks vaguely OK, some smashed lights but probably only dents in panels. This may hide underlying damage depending on chassis strength, but newer cars often look wrecked after a low speed shunt. That's because newer cars are designed to deform to cushion impact for pedestrians (or more suitably in our case, cyclists) and to save the chassis, just like a helmet.